Ontos

Agentic being in the world.

{ }
coding
mathematics
Aa
language

Superhuman.

Text reasoning works.

The bet that worked

METR · metr.org/time-horizons

The world is multimodal.

pixels · motion · contact · a body moving through a room

Text reasoning works.?

The demo everyone is chasing

"Agentic AI looks ready for the physical world."

Waddle Labs, July 2026

Real hardware, a competitor's footage, attributed.

But off their training distribution, none of today's models generalize.

Anthropic Frontier Red Team, 9 July 2026

No Anthropic model successfully stood the robot up from a collapsed pose even once.

Humanoid under model control · Anthropic

0
humanoid stand-ups
5.5%
best manipulation success
~0.4
best score, out of 1.0

The world is multimodal.
Yet reasoning is still largely textual.

Pixels, forces, states. Text reasoning has nothing to perceive any of it with, and nothing to check itself against. That gap is physical AI.

Two bets for Physical AI: teleoperation and world models.

Teleoperation

Expensive. Not generalizable.

World models

We can scrape the internet for videos, but how about actions?

[Google DeepMind] Genie 3

Teleoperation:

1. Expensive: One hour of robot data costs more than an hour of human labor.
$120/h
fully loaded 2026 market rate: operator, rig depreciation, QA
2026 market benchmark
$50–150k
the data bill for one new task: 300 to 1,200 demonstrations
2026 market benchmark
2–3h
usable data from one full 8-hour operator shift
operator-shift yield
2. Poor generalization ability: teleoperation + behavior cloning.

Trained on: blue

Tested on: red

[Google DeepMind] ALOHA Unleashed: A Simple Recipe for Robot Dexterity. Trained to fold a blue shirt, it generalizes only to a blue shirt.

Current World Models:

1. Synthetic data: action space is different, hard to transfer to real life.

DreamerV3 — one world model, many simulated domains, none of them the real one.

2. Real video with actions: still need collection.

Ma et al., "Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild"

AGPI · Artificial General Physical Intelligence

The fastest path to AGPI fuses World Models with Agentic Computing: Recursive Agentic World Models.

Generalizable. Works across all domains. Superhuman.

Recursive Agentic World Models

What no one else has

Two levels at once

Predicts low-level latent appearance streams and high-level affordance trajectories in one model.

No action labels required

4D motion read out of unlabelled 2D video is the action.

Reliable reaction

A frame only teaches the model something when perception reads it right.

Agentic deployment as the data flywheel

The agentic layer picks what to attempt, so data collects itself in the field.

Ontos One

Recursive World Models

Predicting pixels, latents, and 4D trajectories, all self-trained.

[Nexar] BADAS · Real World Collision Anticipation

BADAS: Real-World Latent World Models

Pedestrian

Forklift

Collision

Sidewalk delivery

Aerial drone

PEVA · Whole-Body Conditioned Egocentric Video Prediction

A World Model for Embodied Agents: the first whole body conditioned world model

What would a World Model look like if we start from a real embodied agent acting in the real world? It has to have:

  • A real, physically grounded and complex action space, not just abstract control signals.
  • Diverse, real-life scenarios and activities.
Past Frames
whole-body action as a relative 3D pose delta
Next Whole-Body Action
Predictions
Embodiment-agnostic

Actions are relative 3D pose deltas, independent of any specific hardware or control system.

Not just success

Learns from failure and exploration equally, not only expert trajectories.

What-if in pixels

Given history frames and an action, anticipate the consequence. Change the action, the future changes.

PEVA · planning

Planning in the real world by simulating counterfactuals

Trained on real egocentric video and full-body motion capture, not synthetic physics engines. Sample actions → roll them out → keep the path closest to the goal across complex, uncontrolled environments.

starting egocentric view Input
candidate pose
t=4
t=8
t=12
t=16
candidate pose
t=4
t=8
t=12
t=16
selected pose
t=4
t=8
t=12
t=16
goal view Goal
World Motion Models · Flexible Sequence Modeling of SE(3) Trajectory

4D World Motion Model Enables Strong Generalization

Representation · video to SE(3) trajectory
Method · TraceGen
RGB · query points
lifted to 3D
Input · one frame
TraceGen
2D tracks
3D tracks
Generated · T = 32
Application · one model, every domain
Recursive world model

A recursive world model
that self-improves

Predicting pixels, latents, and 4D trajectories, all self-trained.

Video
unlabelled · internet scale
Structured latent
▲ 4D motion ◆ geometry ◈ objects
4D motion is at. No labels needed
World model
ot + at ot+1
predict the next frames
New observations
real frames come back
Act in the world
execute at
self-conditioning every turn is new data
Ontos One

Multi-stream Reaction

Reliable perception and action.

Change-aware multimodal reasoning.

Ontos One knows where to look.

Problem Setting

Five changes. You found them by looking back and forth — the encoder never gets to.

Method

Stateless

Every frame embedded alone.

Stateful (ours)

Carries state across frames — what moved is legible in the embedding itself.

Sample output: "The small blue rubber sphere was moved." Read directly off the embedding, no extra reasoning step.

Did you realize the two images are different?

Five changes.

Two images.

And when you were comparing, did you eyeball the two images back and forth?

Current visual encoders in AI models can't.

Change-aware multimodal reasoning.

Impacts on real-world tasks

Image editing

Reference — Replace person located slightly off-center in the upper-middle section with a large rock.

Baseline — Remove the person standing on the rocky outcrop, arms raised, lower-middle of the image.

+ Ontos — Replace person positioned in the upper-central area of the image with a large rock.

Remote sensing

Reference — Some detached houses appear beside the road on the bareland.

Baseline — The scene is the same as before.

+ Ontos — A building appears at the top of the scene.

Medical imaging

Reference — The main image has additional findings of lung opacity and atelectasis vs. the reference image. It is missing the finding of cardiomegaly vs. the reference image.

Baseline — The main image has additional findings of atelectasis and cardiomegaly. It is missing the findings of pleural effusion and lung opacity.

+ Ontos — The main image has additional findings of atelectasis and lung opacity. It is missing the finding of cardiomegaly.

Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulation

Ontos One reacts “fast and slow”.

Slow system

Understand the goal, plan long-horizon actions, use language and vision, predict the future.

Fast system

React to contact, adjust force and trajectory, correct slip and errors, keep contact stable.

~5 Hz
slow system: deliberate reasoning
~20 Hz
fast system: reactive tactile reflex

Ontos augments VLAs with a fast tactile reflex pathway. Slow deliberation sets the direction; fast reaction delivers the dexterity.

Multi-stream Reaction

Ontos One self calibrates.

C cubed generate, verify, and repair loop with a calibrated acceptance test

C³: Calibrated Conformal Control for Verifiably Steerable Foundation Models

Ontos One

Agentic Self-improvement

Agentic harness for Physical AI.

Agentic Self-improvement

Code as Policy

[Google] Code-as-Policies: an LLM turns an instruction into a program built from perception and control primitives. Liang et al., ICRA 2023 · code-as-policies.github.io

RATs · Robotic Agent Teams

A recursive world model, that self-coordinates.

RATs: four-stage robotic agent team coordination loop

Ontos One, the first Agentic Harness for Physical AI with multimodal reasoning,
via Recursive World Models and Reliable Reaction.

Multi-stream Reaction Vision Tactile Language Sound Recursive World Models Agentic Self-improvement Robotics Geospatial & defense Medical imaging Gaming & simulation Home & office cameras Autonomous vehicles
Short-term reasoning

Skills

A multimodal LLM–VLA that runs one module per modality, each at its own rate — vision, tactile, language, sound. Foveation, comparison, grounding.

Mid-term reasoning

Imagination

A recursive world model built on a 4D-conditioned latent sequence model — and the 4D structure is self-trained from 2D pixel prediction, so no one has to label it.

Long-term reasoning

Continual self-improvement

An agentic robotic harness that imagines futures, forms plans, then executes, refines and banks the skill it just learned.

Competitive landscape

No one else has the full stack a physical agent needs.

World modelto plan in
Agenticself-improves
Ontosone stack: reason, plan, improve
Skild · Physical Intelligenceteleoperation → VLA policy
Waddle · OpenAI · Anthropictext models given a body
Ekavision-force-action, learned in sim
World Labs · Genesis · Moonvalleygenerative world models · Genie 3
AMIcognitive architecture, research

Trillion-dollar market for Physical AI

drivable-area segmentation on a city streetBDD100K · CVPR 20

Autonomous vehicles

pixels, depth, motion

robot arm executing a predicted actionARM4R · ICML 25

Robotics

vision, action, force

overhead satellite view with a segmented targetLISAt · NeurIPS 25

Geospatial & defense

SAR, multi-spectral, volumetric

axial CT slice with a segmented lesionCT Seg · arXiv 26

Medical imaging

3D volumes, small changes

generated environment rolled out by a world modelNWM · CVPR 25

Gaming & simulation

space and time, interactive

everyday indoor scene from a head-mounted cameraPEVA · NeurIPS 25

Home & office cameras

continuous, everyday scenes

Competitive landscape

Physical AI is not a robotics category

AVvehicles
Roboticsbodies
Geodefense
Simgaming
Cameraseveryday
Ontospublished in all five
Skild · Physical Intelligenceteleoperation → VLA policy
Waddle · OpenAI · Anthropictext models given a body
Ekavision-force-action, learned in sim
Waabi · Wayveend-to-end driving world models
RAIC Labs · Capellaunlabeled GEOINT · SAR
World Labs · Genesis · Moonvalleygenerative world models · Genie 3
AMIcognitive architecture, research

Four key impact areas

Two we already showed.

01

Real world robotics

Sample efficient dexterous manipulation learning leading to self-exploration and learning. Carry stacked dishes and cups like human waiter. Use a Sharpa hand to manipulate chopsticks to pick up sushi, or an ice cube.

02

Gaming

PEVA++ enabled cross embodiment mocap transfer: agile and on demand reconfigurable NPCs.

03

Geospatial

Reasoning over diverse, heterogeneous Geospatial data. We need to infer complex relationships across and between sensors to understand environmental risk.

Satellite, drone, camera, acoustic, wildlife, and mobile sensors overlaid on the globe
UAV, satellite, bioacoustic, camera-trap, and animal-sensor streams fused into species, biomass, and occupancy
Spotted lanternfly nymphs on a plant stem Wildfire flames and smoke Overhead satellite view of coastline, fields, and settlement Cracked drought soil
Kahramanmaraş, Turkey — 7 February 2023 — Planet Labs
No existing LLM can handle this
Extreme Geospatial Reasoning
04

Environment monitoring

Build easily, launch fast, and connect with millions in the new Ring Appstore.

ring Developer
Ring alarm, keypad, doorbell, camera, and sensors

Business Intelligence & Operations

Event-based notifications, workflow automation, customer traffic analysis.

Elderly Care Monitoring

Motion analysis, activity alerts, daily summaries.

Pet Wellness Assessment

Behavior pattern analysis, health insights, mood detection.

Home Analytics

Pool condition monitoring, package theft detection.

Amazon Ring Marketplace API — home and office cameras. Pipeline, not signed.

The build plan

The first twelve months

Months 0–3

One model per layer

  • Data and GPU deals
  • Open-source → proprietary: one model per layer
  • SOTA on at least one domain, each layer
  • Serve free, rate-limited
Months 3–6

Merge into AGPI

  • Scale and merge across domains
  • Scale and merge across layers
  • Serve an AGPI model, breadth increasing
Months 6–12

Distill, sell, edge

  • Modularize and distill AGPI
  • Serve / sell proprietary models
  • Efficient edge, or hybrid edge/cloud

AGPI — artificial general physical intelligence — is the merged model these three capabilities fuse into.

The team

Luc Vincent

Co-founder & CEO
Google Street View · Lyft Level 5 · Meta · BADAS

Trevor Darrell

Co-founder, President & CSO
Berkeley & MIT professor · founded BAIR · Caffe, FCN, LRCN · Pinterest, Prompt, Voio, SafelyYou, Nexar

Yutong Bai

Co-founder & CTO
LVM · PEVA · Google Brain, Meta, Berkeley

Colin Wang

Founding Engineer
CharXiv · SVE · Princeton, Berkeley

The first ‘World’ Model: Google Street View

Google Street View capture car

The first planet-scale capture system. Built by our CEO.

LVM · CVPR 2024

Large Vision Model: the First Scalable Vision-only World model

We figured out how to reason directly in raw sensory data: no language supervision, no curated labels. That unlocks a structural data advantage others cannot replicate.

Capabilities
  • Trains on raw, unlabeled visual streams at internet scale
  • Learns from visual context alone, no text labels required
  • Data flywheel: every modality, every environment feeds the model
420B
visual tokens, zero language
7B
parameters · one epoch
Visual sentences unify images, video, and annotations into one training format

Visual sentences · UVD-V1 · CVPR 2024

Moat

01

Speed and experience

The team has shipped this class of model before — we get to a working system faster than anyone starting from scratch.

02

Unique architecture

Not something an average team reproduces. The design choices come from having built the prior generation.

03

Open-source and proprietary

Open weights build the ecosystem and the funnel; the proprietary stack stays ours.

04

Partner network

Fleets, labs and design partners already in reach — distribution and interaction data from day one.

Hiring

4
founders
8
research stars
2
infra / MLOps
2
ops
16
total headcount
The eight research hires

Experience spread evenly across the four domains — two in each, so no single vertical carries the model.

Robotics · 2 Gaming · 2 Geospatial · 2 Environmental monitoring · 2
Partner network

Possible data deals

Nexar
LVTD
Driving footage. BADAS already in the stack.
UCB HIC partners
TD
GM, Panasonic, Bosch, Samsung, …
Robot.com
TD
Robotics fleet access.
EA
TD
Gaming and simulation.
Amazon Ring Marketplace API
Home and office cameras.

Pipeline, not signed. Initials are who owns the relationship.

The raise: $100M · room to $180M

Two-year runway. Same plan — the delta is compute.

Base
$100M
~$49M / yr × 2
GPUs$40M/yr
Team$7M/yr
Facilities$1M/yr
Data$1M/yr
Run-rate~$49M/yr
Accelerated
$180M
GPUs scale · team & data grow
GPUs$80M/yr
Team$7M/yr +%
Facilities$1M/yr
Data$1M/yr +%
2-yr capital~$180M

Primary ask $100M at $1B post. $180M is the same milestones with compute bought forward. · AMI · World Labs · Skild · Liquid AI · Physical Intelligence

ONTOS

Reasoning, rebuilt for
the multimodal world.

Backup

Multi-stream Reaction

Ontos has scalable modularity.

FlexOlmo modular data experts combining into one model without retraining

FlexOlmo: Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use

Reasoning stands in the way

01

Data

There is no internet of physical interaction.

02

Reasoning

Plan, search, and backtrack still happen in text, not in the world.

03

Real time

The loop closes in milliseconds, not seconds.

Go to market & monetization

The motion The meter
LandMonths 0–3
Design partners who already own fleets and already buy from vendors.
Data for credits — partners pay in interaction data, not cash. Free tier alongside it, rate limited.
ProveMonths 3–6
One embodiment against their baseline, then a second embodiment.
Paid API — usage-based pricing once the model beats that baseline.
ExpandMonths 6–12
Serving across the fleet, deployment data compounding into what we train next.
Enterprise / edge API — dedicated and on-device deployments.

Revenue lines are cumulative — the earlier ones keep running as the next one opens.

To decide: which partners, on what contract, and the date of the first dollar

How we expect the first deals to be structured

Data for credit

Fleet access, paid in model credits.

Data for equity

Sustained access, for a stake.

Compute for equity

Offsets the $40M training line.

Design partner, cash

Paid deployment from day one.

NVIDIA · Panasonic · Bosch · Apple · Robot.com · EA · Kitware / NGA · Ring

To decide: status of each counterparty: live, warm intro, or illustrative

Founding faculty advisors

Sewon Min

UC Berkeley
FlexOlmo

David Chan

UC Irvine
Reverse

Roei Herzig

Simon Fraser University
T-Rex

Ritwik Gupta

University of Maryland
LISAt

Sara Beery

MIT
WILDS
COVT · Chain-of-Visual-Thought

Teaching VLMs to See and Think Better with Continuous Visual Tokens

What it does
COVT interleaves discrete text tokens and continuous visual tokens inside think tags
Result
Counting
Counting: segment tokens locate three uncut fruits
Relative depth
Relative depth: depth tokens decide which point is closer
Scene understanding
Scene understanding: segment and depth tokens find the painting on the wall