Some research labs just push AI forward. Fundamental Research Labs just kicked the door in, rewired the hinges, and walked out with $33 million in fresh Series A fuel from Prosus Ventures. Not bad for a company that started life as “Altera” in December 2023 and now sits in the Bay Area quietly turning “what if” into “when.”
The brain trust is pure technical artillery. Dr. Guangyu Robert Yang, a computational neuroscientist who once taught at MIT and was named a Searle Scholar, is running point as CEO. CTO Shuying Luo brought eight years of Google muscle, including AI features for Google Editors used by 100 million people. Chief Science Officer Dr. Andrew Ahn turned MIT mathematics into deep learning firepower after postdocs at Columbia and Cornell. And Chief Business Officer Nico Christie turned an MIT MBA and PredictionStrike from zero to 150,000 users and millions in revenue.
They are not building chatbots. They are building “digital humans,” autonomous, collaborative AI agents that can work long-term, learn, and actually care. Shortcut, their spreadsheet-native analyst, just humiliated first-year McKinsey and Goldman analysts in blind tests, 89% win rate, solving championship-level financial models in under ten minutes at 10x the human speed. The waitlist hit 20,000 before launch in July 2025, and the subscription model is already paying its own freight.
This isn’t just speed, it’s scale. On the OSWorld benchmark, the same test Anthropic and OpenAI run, they posted 48.45%, nearly double the next best. Project Sid? One thousand autonomous agents in Minecraft forming economies, cultures, even religions. That’s not code. That’s civilization in silico.
Under the hood is their PIANO architecture, Parallel Information Aggregation via Neural Orchestration, which lets agents talk to humans and each other in real time while staying coherent. It’s why Shortcut and Fairies, their prosumer AI assistant, can jump between apps and contexts without falling apart.
With $40 million raised to date, backers like a16z Speedrun, Patron, First Spark Ventures, Factorial, VamosVentures, Eric Schmidt, and Patrick Collison aren’t betting on a fad. They’re betting on a company moving from productivity software to embodied robotics, one paid subscription and one scientific breakthrough at a time.
