A former Mistral employee is seeking $80m for his new company, Genesis Robotics, which is developing an AI-powered simulation platform to train the next generation of robots.
Research scientist Theophile Gervet quit his role at French AI darling Mistral in December, according to his Linkedin. Since then, he has been listed as the founder of a stealth AI and robotics startup.
Two people familiar with the matter tell Sifted the company is currently raising $80m. “Genesis Robotics is the big round happening in Paris at the moment,” said one.
Cofounder Zhou Xian is a student at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in the US. At the end of December, Xian posted about the “Genesis project” on social media platform X, describing it as an open source “research collaboration involving over 20 research labs”.
Neither Xian nor Gervet responded to request to comment.
The Genesis project is a simulation platform to create virtual worlds that can be used to train AI models for robotics. These models create virtual environments in which robots can simulate performing tasks and navigating their surroundings, which is faster than training the technology in a real world setting.
Xian said in his post that Genesis can deliver simulations 10-80 times faster than existing tools, such as Nvidia’s simulation engine IsaacGym.
However, he subsequently clarified that Genesis’ models “only included three relatively simple and static scenes, which were not comprehensive enough to fully support this claim.”
“Genesis is REALLY FAST, consistently performing well across varied conditions while maintaining simulation fidelity,” he added.
Members of Europe’s AI community appear excited about the stealthy startup. In January, Deepmind developer Philipp Schmid posted on Linkedin about the company, describing it as “absolutely insane.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ex-mistral-genesis-robotics-80m/
