Why we invested in Model-Prime

by Kristin McDonald and Vic Singh

We’re pleased to share the news that our portfolio company Model-Prime has emerged from stealth and raised $3.3 million in funding from Eniac Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and Quiet Capital.

Founders Arun Venkatadri and Jeanine Gritzer were both veterans of the self-driving industry at companies like Uber, Aurora, and Motional. While there, they saw the challenge facing new companies that would have to build these robotics and autonomy data platforms and tooling from scratch.

They created Model-Prime to solve that problem, giving all robotics teams access to the enterprise-grade tooling they need to use their log data — everything from ingesting metadata to searching logs, building models, and verifying builds — without requiring an enterprise-grade data infra team to do it.

When we met Arun and Jeanine, we were immediately impressed with their understanding of the problem. We were also excited about our shared vision for unbundling the robotics stack: As we’ve invested in a number of robotics startups, we’ve seen everything needed for that full stack, with so many costly components that companies have to build that ultimately distract from their core product. Thanks to Model-Prime, one of those components — the data layer — is no longer on their plates.

And removing that friction to build has implications that extend far beyond just robotics. The tech world zeitgeist has recently been consumed by the importance of reinvigorating fundamental sectors of the economy like transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing, to be more efficient, resilient and sustainable. But achieving so-called American Dynamism or Global Resilience will require significant advancements in underlying technologies like robotics and autonomy.

By dramatically reducing the costs of building and scaling those technologies, Model-Prime will be a key part of unlocking this transformation. After all, just imagine how many fewer SaaS companies there’d be if everyone one of them had to build each component of their data stack from scratch. Model-Prime can achieve something similar in robotics, dramatically reducing the cost of starting and operating a company in the space.

Or as Arun puts it, “If you’re a robotics company, you want to build robots, not infra. We make that a reality.”

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