Rerun, a company developing a multimodal data stack for Physical AI, has raised $17 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Point Nine, with participation from Sunflower Capital and existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp. Prominent angel investors, including Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Oliver Cameron (CEO of Odyssey), Wes McKinney (creator of pandas, Apache Arrow, and Ibis), Eric Jang (VP of AI at 1X), and Nicolas Dessaigne (General Partner at Y Combinator), also contributed to the funding. This latest round brings Rerun’s total capital raised to $20.2 million.
Addressing a Critical Bottleneck in Physical AI
Physical AI, which powers robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, and spatial computing devices, relies on complex multimodal data captured from cameras and sensors. However, existing data infrastructure is not designed to handle this type of information efficiently, creating a major obstacle for industry progress.
“Most of the world’s GDP exists in the physical world, creating an enormous opportunity for Physical AI to transform our economy,” said Nikolaus West, Co-Founder and CEO of Rerun. “But the current data stack wasn’t built for this new reality.”
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As investment in Physical AI accelerates, the need for better data management solutions becomes more urgent. Rerun aims to solve this challenge by launching a purpose-built database and cloud data platform designed to handle dynamic data formats such as video streams, 3D scenes, and evolving sensor inputs.
A New Approach to Data Visualization and Management
Rerun’s open-source project, designed for high-performance visualizations of Physical AI data, has already gained traction among industry leaders, including Meta, Google, Hugging Face’s LeRobot, and Unitree. Traditional data solutions for robotics often require in-house development, leading to inefficiencies and limited flexibility. By rewriting its data model from the ground up in Rust and drawing inspiration from gaming engine architectures, Rerun offers a high-performance, adaptable solution for the industry.
“Say a robot drives into a wall. Why did it do that? You need tools that allow you to see the world through the eyes of the robot to know why it acted the way it did,” explained West. “That’s what we’ve built.”
The company’s leadership team includes experts from Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly, and Zipline, with contributors who have played key roles in developing robotics and data visualization technologies, such as the rosbag format and Apache Datafusion. Their CTO, Emil Ernerfeldt, is also the creator of egui, the largest open-source GUI framework in Rust.
Enabling Faster Development and Experimentation
Traditional file-oriented robotics data tools lack the flexibility needed for rapid iteration, while conventional data warehouse and lakehouse architectures are ill-suited for Physical AI applications. Rerun’s database integrates its flexible data model with built-in visualization, offering high performance and streamlined workflows for developers.
“All companies developing Physical AI are bottlenecked on speed of product development,” said Moritz Schiebold, Co-Founder and COO. “There is a data flywheel in Physical AI. The smarter your system is, the more units you get to deploy, which allows you to collect more data to train on, which makes your system even smarter. Rerun helps teams run more experiments faster, which is the biggest lever on development speed.”
Expanding to Meet Growing Demand
Rerun’s latest funding will accelerate the development of its commercial database offering and deepen integration with the broader robotics and Physical AI ecosystem. The company plans to double its team size by the end of the year.
“Rerun’s mission to build the multimodal data stack for Physical AI is wildly ambitious, and we’re excited to support Emil, Moritz, Niko, and the team on their journey,” said Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine. “Their work on open source has allowed them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of Physical AI. As AI goes into the world of atoms, we believe Rerun can be the foundational platform enabling companies to build, iterate, and ship better products continuously.”
With a growing community of users and support from industry leaders, Rerun is positioning itself as a key player in shaping the future of Physical AI infrastructure.
