NeoCognition Raises $40M in Seed Funding for On-the-Job Learning AI Agents

Gate News message, April 22 — AI research lab NeoCognition announced the completion of a $40 million seed round, emerging from stealth mode. Founded by Ohio State University Associate Professor Yu Su, along with Xiang Deng and Yu Gu, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The round was oversubscribed, with Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures as lead investors, and Vista Equity Partners as a co-investor.

NeoCognition addresses the reliability challenge in AI agents, where current systems achieve only about 50% success rate in completing tasks as intended—essentially a coin flip with each execution. The company’s approach enables agents to autonomously build domain-specific “world models” through real-world usage, capturing the rules, relationships, and constraints of specific business environments. This allows rapid on-the-job specialization rather than relying on general-purpose pre-training. Yu Su established an LLM agent research lab at Ohio State before ChatGPT’s release; the team’s prior work includes Mind2Web, MMMU, and SeeAct.

Angel investors include Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks co-founder and executive chairman Ion Stoica, and AI researchers Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. Commercially, NeoCognition targets enterprise SaaS companies, embedding continuously improving AI employees into their products and operations. Vista Equity Partners’ portfolio of enterprise software companies provides potential distribution channels. The team comprises approximately 15 members, most holding doctoral degrees; the company has not yet released a public product.