Antioch raises $32M to move robot testing into simulation
Simulation software startup Antioch Inc. today announced $32 million in new funding for product development, engineering hires and deeper simulation capabilities aimed at its customers — robotics, autonomy and perception teams.
Antioch is going after the way autonomous machines get tested today. Every change to a robot, a drone or an industrial machine still has to be proven on physical equipment, at a cost in hardware and engineer hours. Its software calibrates a simulation to a customer’s own hardware, then runs it on cloud infrastructure.
A team that could afford one physical experiment now can run thousands of simulated evaluations in parallel. Co-founder Harry Mellsop said taking autonomous systems into the real world requires a new approach to testing, one built on high-fidelity simulation that supports “faster, safer, and more reliable deployment.”
“Antioch is changing how we develop and validate complex systems by enabling us to rely on simulation with a level of confidence that wasn’t previously possible,” said Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon.com Inc. and chief product officer at its Ring unit. “Antioch’s simulations have closely matched our physical test results, including in scenarios we deliberately held out of calibration.”
