Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison.
The company has a curious structure, as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundamental Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you.
Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team building apps, a core research team, and a platform team. The startup’s founder, Dr. Robert Yang, a former faculty member at MIT, says that Fundamental Research Labs wants to be a “historical” company without adhering to a typical startup structure.
Yang said that the company is already charging users for this agent after a seven-day trial and bringing in revenue.
Among the products Fundamental Research Labs offers is a general-purpose consumer assistant called Fairies. This app allows you to chat with an AI bot, connect applications, and ask questions across the knowledge bases of those applications, then ask it to schedule appointments for you on your calendar. The app can schedule workflows for you to repeatedly execute some tasks. Yang said that this app allows the startup’s engineers to test out various capabilities of models and platform tech it is developing.
The company also offers a spreadsheet-based agent called Shortcut, which has been used by analysts for creating different financial models and performing analysis over them. The startup said that this agent works like a junior analyst and can do work autonomously. The company has made it look like Excel and has tried to retain a lot of functionality for power users.
“We’ve seen many early-stage startups, but what stood out here is a small, highly mission-driven team focused on digital humans with actual use cases. Their recent launches, like Fairies and Shortcut, aren’t just demos; they’re already demonstrating how AI can augment the human workforce in meaningful ways,” Sandeep Bakshi, an investment partner at Prosus, told TechCrunch over email.
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“What stood out with Fundamental Research Labs is not just the ambition of the vision, but again the caliber of the team driving it,” he added. “Their ability to attract some of the brightest minds in the world, and turn that talent into real-world products, makes this a uniquely compelling venture opportunity for us.”
The company raised $9 million in a seed round last year, which was co-led by First Spark Ventures and Patron, with participation from a16z Speedrun and Eric Schmidt. The startup has raised over $40 million in funding to date.
Yang said the company is open to trying out various application models and eventually wants to build robots as well.
“We are working on productivity (apps) now because that is where the most value is created. You can make a lot of money doing this and build your team and tech. Eventually, we want to solve physical problems and move towards working on embodiment,” Yang said.
Correction: The funding round was $33 million, not $30 million; the story was updated with the accurate amount.