Vicarious applies unsupervised learning techniques and a Schema Networks approach to give robots an abstract, causal understanding of tasks that can transfer across environments. The company pursues generalized intelligence rather than a narrow commercial product, surfacing periodically with research milestones such as CAPTCHA-solving (2013) and an Atari Breakout-playing AI. Founded by Scott Phoenix and Dileep George in 2010, the team’s background includes Phoenix’s Frogmetrics and George’s Numenta. The recent funding is intended to expand its research team and build smarter robots. Vicarious does not have a formal, widely distributed product today, making long-term sustainability hard to judge. Financially, the company has raised an additional $50 million in this round, bringing total fundraising to $138 million according to PitchBook. Vicarious is an AI research company led by Dr. Dileep George and D. Scott Phoenix that develops software inspired by the computational principles of the brain. The company is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2010. It has raised nearly $70M in capital since founding. Recently Vicarious received a $12M investment from ABB Technology Ventures. ABB joined existing investors including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff. Vicarious intends to use the new funds to pursue its long‑term research goals. Vicarious developed technology that solved CAPTCHA queries last fall and is focused on rethinking core learning algorithms rather than relying on traditional convolutional neural networks. Co-founders D. Scott Phoenix and Dileep George draw on George’s Stanford doctoral work on hierarchical models of the brain to inform their approach. The company says its methods have produced leaps in performance and are intended to enable breakthroughs in robotics, clean energy, and medicine, ultimately toward what they describe as the world’s first intelligent machines. Vicarious just raised a new $40 million growth round from a broad set of investors, bringing total disclosed funding to $56.1 million. The round included a personal investment from Mark Zuckerberg, while other backers such as Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher invested via their funds. The company has 10 employees and plans to grow its headcount significantly. Vicarious is developing software that thinks and learns like a human, driven by its Recursive Cortical Network. The system is designed to interpret the content of photos and videos in a human-like way. Potential applications the company cites include robotics, medical image analysis, and image and video search. Vicarious has been in research mode since launching in February 2011 and received early funding from Founders Fund, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo, Felicis Ventures, and Joe Lonsdale. It raised a $15 million Series A led by Good Ventures to expand R&D efforts. The founders say commercial products are still several years off and that they are proceeding cautiously, testing progress carefully.

Total raised

$117M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Jul 2017