Antioch Raises $8.5 Million to Bring “Software-Speed” to Physical Autonomy Development

Antioch, the cloud simulation platform for robotics and autonomy, led by Harry Mellsop, Alex Langshur, Colton Swingle, Collin Schlager, and Michael Calvey, has raised $8.5 million led by A* and Category Ventures, with other investors including MaC Venture Capital, Abstract, Box Group, Icehouse Ventures, and angel investors including Shyam Sankar (CTO, Palantir) and Adrian Macneil (CEO, Foxglove).

The company removes the need for physical hardware and real-world testing in developing and evaluating autonomous systems. Traditional validation, requiring rented spaces, manual environment setup, and repeated hardware resets, is costly, slow, and limited in scenario coverage.

Robotics teams often invest significant time and capital into physical testing, including staging environments and building dedicated facilities. Leading companies have addressed this by investing heavily in simulation infrastructure to reduce reliance on real-world testing. The approach centers on making that level of advanced simulation tooling accessible to all autonomy teams.

Antioch’s view is that the simulation ecosystem has matured enough to replace much of real-world testing. Advances in physics and rendering engines, along with generative techniques such as world models, now make it possible to create realistic environments at scale.

However, the landscape is evolving rapidly, with new tools and providers emerging constantly. For most robotics companies, simply keeping up, let alone integrating these tools into a cohesive workflow, remains a significant challenge.

Antioch positions itself as the platform layer that connects autonomy teams to rapidly evolving simulation technologies while abstracting away complexity and fragmentation.

By integrating new tools and capabilities as the ecosystem evolves, the platform provides continuous access to state-of-the-art simulation without requiring teams to rebuild infrastructure. Robots are onboarded once, enabling ongoing use of the latest simulation advancements through a unified system.

The company says it's already working with Fortune 500 technology and logistics companies, FAANG engineering teams, and a range of other players across drones, construction, smart security, and foundation model development.

Three of Antioch’s five co-founders, Mellsop, Alex Langshur, and Michael Calvey, previously founded Transpose, a security and intelligence platform acquired by Chainalysis in 2023. The company served major U.S. intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and financial institutions, with that national security focus continuing to influence Antioch’s direction.

Over the past decades, manufacturing competitiveness has declined due to offshoring, with robotics and automation seen as the most viable path to reindustrialization. In this context, scalable testing is identified as a key bottleneck limiting progress.

Antioch was founded in May 2025, with a team that includes Colton Swingle, formerly of Google DeepMind, and Collin Schlager, previously at Meta Reality Labs. The company is headquartered in New York.

The opportunity is framed around the scale of physical industries, such as manufacturing, logistics, construction, energy, and agriculture, which far exceed the economic footprint of sectors currently disrupted by LLMs.

AI adoption in these industries remains minimal, positioning physical AI as a significantly larger and more transformative wave than the current LLM-driven shift.