Applied AI Research Company Fundumental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus, accompanied by participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison.
The company has a structure that is full of curiosity as it works on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised the seeds, the basic lab was developing a bot that could play Minecraft with you.
Today, the company has a gaming team, a promer team building app, a core research team and a platform team. Dr. Robert Yang, a former faculty member at MIT, founder of Startup, says that basic labs want to become “historical” companies without adhering to the typical startup structure.
Yang said the company has already charged users to the agent after bringing seven days of trial and revenue.
Among the products offered by the Basic Research Lab is a general purpose consumer assistant called Fairies. This app allows you to chat with AI bots, connect applications, ask questions in the knowledge base of those applications, and ask them to schedule appointments on the calendar. The app can schedule workflows to repeatedly execute several tasks. Yang said the app allows startup engineers to test different features of models and platform technologies under development.
The company also offers a spreadsheet-based agent called Shortcuts. This is used by analysts to create various financial models and carry out their analysis. The startup said the agent can act like a junior analyst and work autonomously. The company has made it look like Excel and has tried to preserve many features for power users.
“We’ve seen a lot of early stage startups, and what’s set up here is a small mission-driven team focusing on digital humans with real use cases. Demonstrations aren’t the only recent launches of fairies and shortcuts.
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“What stood out in the basic lab was not just the vision ambitions, but the caliber of the team that propelled it again,” he added. “The ability to attract some of the brightest minds in the world and turn that talent into a real-world product makes this a unique and engaging venture opportunity for us.”
The company raised $9 million in last year’s seed round. This was co-led by First Spark Ventures and Patron, with participation from A16Z Speedrun and Eric Schmidt. The startup has raised more than $40 million in funding so far.
Yang said the company is open to experimenting with a variety of application models and would like to ultimately build a robot.
“We’re currently working on productivity (apps), because that’s the most value. You can make a lot of money to do this, build your team and technology. Ultimately, we hope to solve physical problems and work on realising it,” Yang said.
Amendment: The funding round was $33 million, not $30 million. The story has been updated with an accurate amount.
