SafeWorld Announces its Launch to Improve Robot Safety for the Next Billion Machines

SafeWorld, an AI lab building robot safety simulation technologies, led by Kyle Wong, Dr. Ding Zhao, and Simo Rachidi, emerged from stealth with $12.2M in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun, along with Box Group, Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and other leading VCs & angel investors. SafeWorld’s platform provides safety testing and simulation software to help enterprises evaluate and deploy robots safely and responsibly. 

Robots’ Safety Problem: As Autonomy Scales, Safety Must Scale With It.

AI safety has largely been a software challenge, but AI-powered robots introduce physical consequences when systems fail. As billions of autonomous robots are deployed alongside people, physical AI will require far more safety testing and edge-case simulation than traditional robots.

Current testing relies heavily on slow and expensive physical trials, making large-scale validation difficult. To manage uncertainty, deployers often rely on safety cages and speed limits that reduce robot productivity and human collaboration. Scaling autonomy to billions of machines will require safety validation to scale alongside it.

“Safety has been foundational to Anyware Robotics from day one,” said Thomas Tang, CEO of Anyware Robotics. “Advanced simulation tools like SafeWorld give us a scalable way to test challenging scenarios, strengthen our safety processes, and better prepare our robots for real-world deployment.”

SafeWorld’s Solution: Robot Safety Simulation for Physical AI.

SafeWorld provides enterprises with a scalable way to test robot behavior in rare, dangerous, and unexpected situations without physical risk. Teams can create scenarios in a browser using past incidents, safety standards, and robot logs, without requiring simulation expertise.

The platform runs thousands of scenario variations with realistic, reactive human motion and measures safety performance. Tests can be continuously rerun as software, environments, and robot behavior change, creating a repeatable safety record for engineering, safety, and operations teams.

“As more of the physical world becomes automated, safety needs to become a continuous, intelligent layer that evolves alongside the machines themselves,” said Alex Hartz, General Partner at Shine Capital. “SafeWorld has the rare combination of deep technical expertise in AI and robotics safety, along with the ambition to build the independent safety infrastructure for the physical AI era.”

“AI's impact is going far beyond software and beginning to have profound impact across hardware/robotics in the physical world,” said Jon Lai, General Partner at a16z speedrun. "The SafeWorld team has combined world-class research in safe AI with exceptional commercial execution. By transforming safety testing from manual field trials into automated, high-fidelity simulations, SafeWorld is building the essential trust layer required to deploy the next generation of autonomous machines."

SafeWorld’s Team: Academic and Operational Expertise

SafeWorld was co-founded by researchers and entrepreneurs combining expertise in safe autonomous systems, AI, and company building:

• Dr. Ding Zhao: Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Safe AI Lab and former Google DeepMind researcher, with 17+ years focused on safe autonomous systems.

• Kyle Wong: Founder of Pixlee, an AI and UGC platform used by 1,000+ brands, and former CEO of Stanford’s StartX accelerator.

• Simo Rachidi: Former Principal Security & ML Engineer at Salesforce Einstein and a repeat founder with experience building large-scale ML systems and startups.

“For nearly two decades, I’ve worked on making autonomous systems safer,” said Dr. Ding Zhao. “One of the biggest lessons from autonomous vehicles is that real-world testing alone can’t cover every dangerous situation. As robots move into factories, warehouses, and other human environments, simulation gives us a way to test those situations before they happen in the real world. The same rigor the AI community is bringing to models now needs to apply to the machines those models control.”

”As robotics moves from impressive demos to everyday deployment, safety becomes a prerequisite for adoption." said Kyle Wong, co-founder and CEO of SafeWorld. “We believe more modern ways to test and validate safety can help unlock the broader potential of robotics.” 

SafeWorld is running early pilots with major automotive OEMs, warehouse automation companies, and medical device manufacturers. The company’s oversubscribed funding round also included Ovo Fund, Valkyrie, Zelda Ventures, Alpha Square Group, Founders Future, and Brave Capital, alongside founders and executives from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, DoorDash, Generalist, Dyna, Recursive, Together AI, and Salesforce.

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