Physical AI startup Mowito has raised $3 million in its latest pre-seed funding round. Version One Ventures led the capital investment round. Other investment groups to participate in the financial round included All In Capital, Unisol, and iSeed. In addition to these VC groups, several individual angel investors participated in the financing round. The angel investors participating are Soumith Chintala, Adarsh Kulkarni, Ashish Kulkarni, and Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital. Before that $3 million raise, Mowito raised $540K in a separate angel round.

Market deployment and technological development

The capital raised from this new round will be allocated to scale into the United States, according to the startup’s press release. Mowito plans to invest the capital in growing its engineering workforce and go-to-market teams. The firm also plans to scale its software deployments with other automotive and electronics manufacturers.

Mowito was founded in 2024 by 3 co-founders, Puru Rastogi, Adityanag Nagesh, and Safar V. The startup focuses on the development of Physical AI foundation models for industrial robot arms. The software developed by Mowito helps these industrial robots learn through demonstrations without traditional programming. 

This specific technology enables manufacturers to implement automation rapidly and requires no retooling or changing their existing robot equipment. Traditional industrial robots use fixed programs. The traditional programming techniques can require days to set up correctly. 

When there are changes in a factory product or a manufacturing process or in a single component, traditional programming needs to be completely rewritten. For this reason, Mowito is working on Physical AI models, which will allow the robot to learn directly from physical task demonstrations. This will both minimize the total amount of traditional programming required and ensure precise requirements are met for manufacturing applications.

The company has also announced that its technology is in active use within real production environments. Mowito software has been used to power industrial robots on the manufacturing lines at 1 Fortune 500 automotive company. 

In such configurations, the software enables high-precision assembly applications applicable to the automotive and consumer electronics markets. Mowito is scaling up the scope of its deployment in a market populated by established corporations. It is a direct competitor to Cognex, Keyence, Omron, and Fanuc in the industrial automation and machine vision business.

Conclusion

With the investment of $3 million led by Version One Ventures, Mowito secures the funds required to strengthen its Physical AI foundation models. The startup’s software can enable industrial robot arms to imitate repeated tasks based on physical demonstration, not programming, which differs markedly from what’s currently possible and hits an industrial customer profitability snag when products or processes evolve. Founded in 2024, the startup has been able to scale its software onto active production lines at 1 company in the Fortune 500. With $3 million acquired in capital since its $540K angel round, it will be the lead fuel for the next stage of its life in the global manufacturing market.