Manufacturing is struggling
In a Q3 2023 survey, 32% of manufacturers said that a shortage of labour restricted their ability to meet demand. Because of this growing bottleneck, manufacturers surveyed said they lost or turned down contracts due to a lack of workers, amounting to a $7.2 billion loss in sales. They also added that a lack of skilled workers impedes investment in advanced technologies, harming productivity.
Traditional industrial automation cannot address these tasks: kinematics-based robots are fast and precise but inflexible, while vision-heavy AI systems are adaptable but slow, data-intensive, and costly. This creates a large and growing gap in automating high-value manufacturing work: one that the latest innovations in robotics and physical AI are uniquely positioned to close.
Why hasn’t physical AI been adopted more widely yet?
Physical AI is AI that perceives, reasons, and acts in the physical world through systems like robots, industrial machines, and autonomous vehicles. It involves physics, motion, timing, safety, uncertainty, and real-world feedback.
Physical AI promises to address manufacturers’ limitations by enabling robots to perceive, adapt, and manipulate beyond rigid, preprogrammed routines. Yet adoption has been held back by a fundamental reliability gap. As Dr. Horst J. Kayser, a leader in manufacturing’s digital transformation at Siemens, put it:
"In physical AI, 85% right is not enough. It has to be 99.99% right, if not even more nines after the comma in some processes".
To date, no system has demonstrated that level of consistency and accuracy at scale in a real manufacturing environment. Bridging this gap is the defining challenge and the defining opportunity for the next generation of industrial robotics.
Autonomique is seizing this massive opportunity
Autonomique is closing this gap by solving the three core pillars of robotics: perception, reasoning, and action; within a unified, scalable framework. Its Semantic Scene Graph enables real-time structured perception, a hybrid skills library supports intelligent task reasoning, and a hardware abstraction layer ensures fast, precise execution across robotic platforms.
This architecture delivers 10–100× lower training data and compute requirements than pure learning-based approaches, while maintaining the adaptability needed for complex real-world environments.
The company was founded by a team combining deep technical expertise in AI and robotics: CEO Vikrant Tomar (PhD in AI, former co-founder of Fluent.AI), Arash Radmoghadam, and Sean Xu. With early traction in the automotive space, Autonomique is perfectly positioned to capture meaningful share of the $84B manufacturing robotics market (13.8% CAGR) and emerge as a foundational intelligence layer for next-generation industrial robotics.
Our investment
We’re proud to be partnering with Vikrant, Arash and Sean on their mission to make robots adaptable and bring next-generation automation to manufacturing. And we’re excited to be investors in their Seed round alongside our friends at White Star Capital, Garage Capital, iNovia, and the founders of ClearPath & OTTO Motors.
This investment aligns with several of IRV’s core themes:
- An IP grounded in research: Autonomique’s moat lies in its comprehensive IP portfolio and systematic framework with strong ties to Standford University, MILA and a growing list of internal patents.
- Early customer confirmation: The team has managed to nurture a deep relationship with a Tier-1 automotive supplier which is currently going through an advanced pilot phase in one of their factories.
- A flexible approach: Autonomique is creating the most adaptable system through modularity and extensibility, not one large model to do it all, but a framework that knows how to do many things and quickly learns to do new things.
We’re excited to support a team that combines deep domain expertise with a get-things-done attitude. The automation industry has been waiting for physical AI to fix their problems and we believe Autonomique will be their solution.
“Physical AI is the missing layer that manufacturing has been waiting for. Autonomique has built something genuinely different: not one large model, but a framework that learns and adapts. We’re proud to back Vikrant, Arash, and Sean as they bring that intelligence to the factory floor.”
From Pilot to Production
Since IRV’s investment, Autonomique has reached a major milestone: its robot autonomy platform has graduated from a paid pilot to a live production cell at F&P Mfg., a Tier-1 automotive supplier and subsidiary of Japan-listed F.tech Inc. This makes Autonomique one of the first Physical AI companies to deploy on a real automotive production line: exactly the kind of real-world validation that defines category-defining companies. Read the full announcement here.
About Autonomique
Headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, with an office in Montreal, QC, Autonomique develops hardware-agnostic Physical AI software that brings human-like dexterity and reasoning to industrial robots, enabling rapid, cost-effective automation across automotive, electronics, and aerospace manufacturing. A spinout of SRI International, the company holds exclusive access to several SRI technologies. Autonomique is led by co-founder and CEO Vikrant Tomar, a repeat entrepreneur with a PhD in AI and formerly Founder and CTO of Fluent.ai, alongside a team with deep backgrounds in robotics engineering, AI, and product development. For more information, visit www.autonomique.ai.
About Innovobot and Innovobot Resonance Ventures
Innovobot is an investment platform that creates value through innovation. Innovobot Resonance Ventures (IRV) is its venture capital arm, dedicated to investing in early-stage deep-tech startups. Innovobot Labs is the platform’s innovation studio, tackling pressing problems through the development and application of cutting-edge technologies. With expertise spanning robotics, AI, IoT, human-machine interfaces, advanced materials, and photonics, the Labs collaborate with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 leaders.
Deep tech is our domain. We know how to evaluate transformative technologies, identify category-defining companies, and most importantly, back and support the winners. The next era of innovation won’t come from another horizontal SaaS platform; it will come from deep-tech pioneers and we’re here to back them.