Nomadic emerges with $8.4M to build physical AI training platform for Robotics and AV teams. Nomadic turns large-scale video datasets into production-ready training data and rapid operational insight; already already used by Zoox, Mitsubishi Electric, and others. San Francisco, CA - WEBWIRE - Tuesday, March 31, 2026 Nomadic's Founders: Mustafa Bal (CEO)and Varun Krishnan (CTO) Nomadic, a startup building the spatial intelligence layer for physical AI, today announced $8.4M in funding led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Pear VC, Jeff Dean, and angels & executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind. Nomadic acts as the visual data engine for robotics and autonomous vehicle teams, enabling continuous monitoring of real-world systems while simultaneously generating production-ready training data and edge-case libraries. The platform is already used by organizations including Zoox, Mitsubishi Electric (Automotive America), Zendar, and others. Physical AI's Bottleneck: Video That Doesn't Turn into Learning Fast Enough Robotics and autonomy teams collect massive volumes of driving and operational footage. But most of it remains underutilized: reviewed manually, inconsistently labeled, or stored as static archives. As robots move from research environments into large-scale real-world deployment, the bottleneck is no longer model architecture or compute. The bottleneck is understanding what is actually happening across fleets, and turning that understanding into continuous learning. Teams face two parallel challenges: * Monitoring: What is happening across our fleet right now? Which failures, regressions, or safety-critical events are emerging? * Training: Which data should we use next to improve our models? How can we find rare failures buried inside tens of thousands of hours of footage? "Most fleet data goes unreviewed because no human team can get through it all, yet it's precisely the rare, edge-case footage buried in those archives that matters most for training," said Antonio Puglielli, VP of Engineering Zendar. "Nomadic makes the full dataset usable, compressing weeks of manual review into minutes so engineers can focus on improving models rather than hunting for the right clips." Nomadic's Solution: Monitoring and Structured Training Data in One Platform Nomadic is the video intelligence layer that turns raw robotics and AV footage into training-ready data. Its platform analyzes thousands of videos simultaneously to automatically surface failures and key moments, then convert them into structured, searchable events. Instead of treating video as a pile of files, Nomadic transforms it into a living dataset, helping teams validate perception performance, improve data quality, and prioritize what to train next. The result is a faster loop from real-world footage to production models, without needing hundreds of human data labelers. Key features include: * Automated event detection that flags critical motion moments without manual review. * Compliance analysis to detect potential operational violations and safety issues. * AI-powered insights that add analysis and recommendations for detected events. * Video search to find similar events across libraries and identify patterns. * Natural-language analysis to detect custom scenarios Multi-sensor uploads so a single run can include front/left/right camera sets as well as LiDAR/logs. "Teams are sitting on a goldmine of video and sensor data, but most of it never becomes usable training signal," said Mustafa Bal, cofounder and CEO of Nomadic. "We built Nomadic to bring world-class perception workflows to every robotics team, not just the largest AV labs." "Physical AI is going to be won by the teams that can learn fastest from the real world," said Andrew Marks, Co-founding Partner of TQ Ventures. "Nomadic gives robotics and AV builders the most actionable way to understand their data and rapidly improve their systems." Worldclass Founding Team Nomadic was founded by Harvard computer science graduates Mustafa Bal (CEO) and Varun Krishnan (CTO), who combined their expertise in large scale optimization of distributed systems to tackle the data bottleneck in physical AI. Bal previously worked on AI/ML teams at Snowflake and Microsoft, where he was a core contributor to Microsoft's DeepSpeed library. Krishnan is a U.S. Chess Master and former INFORMS Wagner Prize finalist for his research on optimizing large-scale systems. They've built a technical team hailing from industry giants like Amazon, Snowflake, and IBM Research, bringing world-class specialization in computer vision, large-scale AI optimization, and production machine learning to the robotics frontier Companies can try Nomadic today at https://www.nomadicai.com/. About Nomadic Nomadic is a physical AI training platform for robotics and autonomous systems. The company converts large video archives into structured, training-ready datasets that help teams monitor real-world performance and accelerate continuous learning. Headquartered in San Francisco, Nomadic works with customers across autonomy, robotics, and industrial applications. Its platform is already used by teams including Zoox, Mitsubishi Electric (Automotive America), Zendar, and others. Nomadic has raised $8.4M from investors including TQ Ventures, Jeff Dean, Pear VC, BAG Ventures, Predictive VC, and Scott Wu. Learn more at https://www.nomadicai.com/. 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Hertha Metals named world's No. 1 most innovative manufacturing co. of 2026. Mar 30, 2026, 8:30 am U.S. Rep. Morgan Luttrell, a Magnolia Republican, and Hertha Metals founder and CEO Laureen Meroueh toured Hertha's Conroe plant in August. Photo courtesy Hertha Metals/Business Wire. Led by Conroe-based Hertha Metals, five organizations in the Houston area earned shoutouts on Fast Company's list of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2026. Last year, Hertha unveiled a single-step process for steelmaking that it says is cheaper, more energy-efficient and just as scalable as traditional steel manufacturing. It started testing the process in 2024 at a one-metric-ton-per-day pilot plant. At the same time, Hertha announced more than $17 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Breakthrough Energy, Clean Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Pear VC. "We're not just reinventing steelmaking; we're redefining what's possible in materials, manufacturing, and national resilience," Laureen Meroueh, founder and CEO of Hertha, said at the time. Hertha, founded in 2022, says traditional steelmaking relies on an outdated, coal-based multistep process that is costly, and contributes up to 9 percent of industrial energy use and 10 percent of global carbon emissions. By contrast, Hertha's method converts low-grade iron ore into molten steel or high-purity iron in one step. The company says its process is 30 percent more energy-efficient than traditional steelmaking and costs less than producing steel in China. Last year, Hertha said it planned to break ground in 2026 on a plant capable of producing more than 9,000 metric tons of steel per year. In its next phase, the company plans to operate at 500,000 metric tons of steel production per year. Here are Fast Company's rankings for the four other Houston-area organizations: * Houston-based Vaulted Deep, No. 3 in catchall "other" category. * XGS Energy, No. 7 in the energy category. XGS' proprietary solid-state geothermal system uses thermally conductive materials to deliver affordable energy anywhere hot rock is located. While Fast Company lists Houston as XGS' headquarters, and the company has a major presence in the city, XGS is based in Palo Alto, California. * Houston-based residential real estate brokerage Epique Realty, No. 10 in the business services category. Epique, which bills itself as the industry's first AI brokerage, provides a free AI toolkit for real estate agents to enhance marketing, streamline content creation, and improve engagement with clients and prospects. * Texas A&M University's Nanostructured Materials Lab in College Station. The lab studies nano-structured materials to make materials lighter for the aerospace industry, improve energy storage, and enable the creation of "smart" textiles. new leader energy breakthrough fresh funding EnergyCapitalHTX emails are awesome. A View From HETI. The View From HETI retirement plans Mar 30, 2026, 11:30 am Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental (Oxy), is set to retire this year, Reuters first reported Thursday. Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the oil and gas giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as chief operating officer and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company. Reuters reports that a firm date for her retirement has not been set. Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, is expected to replace Hollub in the CEO role. Oxy is leading a number of energy transition projects. It's subsidiary 1PointFive is developing a $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area that is slated to be the largest facility of its kind in the world. Known as STRATOS, it's designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. The company shared recently that Phase 1 of the project is expected to go online in Q2, with Phase 2 ramping up through the remainder of 2026. "We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup," Hollub said of Stratos last year. "We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape," she added. Oxy was one of the first to set ambitious net-zero goals. In a 2020 interview during CERAWeek, Hollub outlined Oxy's future as a "carbon management company." "Ultimately, I don't know how many years from now, Occidental becomes a carbon management company, and our oil and gas would be a support business unit for the management of that carbon. We would be not only using [CO2] in oil reservoirs [but] capturing it for sequestration as well," Hollub said. Oxy opened its Oxy Innovation Center in the Ion last year, focused on advancing low-carbon technology. It also operates Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others.

Cardless, a credit card platform enabling companies to launch branded credit cards in-house, has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by Spark Capital. The funding brings total capital raised to over $170 million, with participation from Activant Capital, Industry Ventures and Pear VC. The company's platform allows brands to manage entire card programmes—from application to customer experience—launching cards in 90 days versus the traditional 18-month timeline. Cardless handles underwriting, compliance and customer support whilst brands maintain control of customer relationships. High-profile clients include Bilt, Coinbase, Qatar Airways and Alibaba. Credit card programmes on the platform have reported 400% year-over-year transaction growth. The company plans to expand existing programmes, launch new co-branded cards and develop additional financial products targeting the $200 billion credit card industry.