ChainThink report, according to an official announcement, AI research lab NeoCognition has completed a $40 million seed round and emerged from stealth mode.

The company, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, was co-founded by Yu Su, Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, along with Xiang Deng and Yu Gu.

The round was oversubscribed, led jointly by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners. Angel investors include Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks Ion Stoica, as well as AI researchers Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer.

NeoCognition focuses on addressing the reliability challenges of AI agents; founder Yu Su notes that current AI agents successfully complete tasks as intended only about 50% of the time.

The company’s approach enables agents to autonomously build domain-specific “world models” through real-world usage, capturing rules, relationships, and constraints inherent in specific business environments, thereby achieving rapid role specialization—without relying on generic pre-training.

Prior notable work from the team includes Mind2Web, MMMU, and SeeAct. The commercial roadmap targets enterprise clients, primarily SaaS companies, helping them embed AI employees capable of continuous self-improvement within their products and operational workflows.

Vista Equity Partners holds significant stakes in enterprise software firms, and its participation is seen as providing potential distribution channel support. The team currently consists of around 15 members, most holding PhDs, with no publicly available product yet.