Senior UAV Autonomy Engineer - Drone Stack

SiMa.ai secures $150 million Series C, valued at $1.45 billion. GTM & Outbound Investigative Reporter - 2026-09-30 - 1 min SiMa.ai announced a $150 million Series C round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, valuing the San Jose startup at $1.45 billion ventureburn.com. The oversubscribed round also attracted J.P. Morgan, AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital and the State of Michigan, bringing total capital raised to $500 million. The cash will be poured into aggressive research and development, with the company targeting a 1,000 dense TOPS AI chip by 2028. SiMa.ai's proprietary Palette Neat software and purpose-built silicon aim to replace power-hungry GPUs in autonomous cars, drones and robots, cutting deployment times from months to days. By securing partnerships with Bosch, Synopsys and Micron, SiMa.ai is moving beyond prototype to commercial scale, challenging NVIDIA's dominance in cloud training by offering low-power, on-device inference. Analysts project 145 million physical AI devices shipped by 2035, a market SiMa.ai hopes to capture with its edge-optimized chips. Topics: #MarTech #News Aura-V Engineering Advisory Interested in implementing this technology inside your company? Its studio designs custom agent meshes, data pipelines, and outbound GTM systems for forward-looking enterprises.

Physical AI company SiMa.ai raises $150 mn in Series C round. September 29, 2026 Physical AI company SiMa.ai has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round as it looks to expand its platform for artificial intelligence applications across robotics, automotive, drones and other physical systems. The latest round values the company at $1.45 billion and takes its total capital raised to $500 million. The Series C round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify. Existing investors Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, +ND Capital, Point72 and StepStone Group also participated in the round. AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan and the State of Michigan joined as new investors. Founded in 2018 by Krishna Rangasayee, SiMa.ai develops a software-centric platform designed for Physical AI applications. The company focuses on areas including robotics, automotive, drones, industrial automation, aerospace and defence, smart vision and healthcare. SiMa.ai said it currently serves more than 150 customers across automotive, drones and robotics. Its customer base includes ARK Electronics, AVerMedia, Bosch, Emerson, Intrinsic, Kontron, L&T Technology Services, Mistral, STIGA, Synopsys and Virya Autonomous Tech, among others. The company said the newly raised capital will be used to scale Palette Neat, its agentic software environment for Physical AI, while also supporting the development of next-generation hardware. The upcoming hardware is being designed to deliver 1,000 TOPS of compute through purpose-built Physical AI silicon. The next-generation hardware is slated for H1 2028 and will include machine learning IP, chiplets and SoCs. SiMa.ai plans to target applications such as medium to high-end drones, humanoid robotics, automotive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and AI-powered cockpits. "Physical AI in humanoids, automotive, and drones is the gateway to a $50 trillion market that has remained largely untouched by modern innovation," said Krishna Rangasayee, Founder and CEO at SiMa.ai. "While others are still figuring out the pieces or repurposing their cloud offerings, we've built the entire puzzle. This investment will further catapult us into a dominant position, giving us the resources to scale our purpose-built platform and secure an undeniable lead in the Physical AI race." SiMa.ai said the global Physical AI devices market, covering robotics, automotive and drones, is projected to reach 145 million cumulative shipments by 2035, according to market research cited by the company. Physical AI systems have traditionally relied on NVIDIA GPUs, which SiMa.ai said can be expensive and power intensive. The company's approach combines purpose-built silicon with software in a full-stack platform intended to simplify the deployment of AI applications on physical devices. The company said its platform can help reduce deployment timelines from months to days or hours. SiMa.ai is also developing its next generation of hardware as AI workloads increasingly move from conventional computing environments into machines that interact with the physical world. The latest funding follows SiMa.ai's earlier expansion of its Physical AI platform and adds further capital for software development, hardware engineering and growth across its target markets. With the Series C, the company plans to accelerate Palette Neat and continue developing silicon designed specifically for Physical AI workloads. The funding round marks another major step in SiMa.ai's effort to build a full-stack platform combining AI software and purpose-built computing hardware for real-world applications across robotics, drones and automotive systems. - Advertisement - September 29, 2026 September 28, 2026

AI firms Modal Labs, Instinct and SiMa.ai secure $750m, $1bn and $150m rounds. Recent funding rounds saw Modal Labs raise $750 million, Instinct $1 billion and SiMa.ai $150 million, while robotics and biotech startups also secured sizable investments. Artificial intelligence. Modal Labs, the New York-based serverless AI inference platform founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna, is close to completing a $750 million financing led by Accel that would lift its post-money valuation to about $15.75 billion, up from $4.65 billion after its May 2026 Series C [1][6]. The round, reported at a valuation near $16 billion in other outlets, more than triples the company's worth in four months and follows revenue growth to over $300 million annualised as of May 2026 [4]. Modal's service lets developers run Python functions and AI workloads on GPUs and CPUs across multiple clouds without managing servers, counting customers such as Cognition, Suno, Ramp and Substack among its roughly 150-person workforce [1]. Edge-AI chipmaker SiMa.ai closed a $150 million Series C at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Fidelity Management & Research and Amplify Partners, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, Point72, StepStone Group and several other investors [3][8]. The company, founded in 2018 by former Xilinx executive Krishna Rangasayee, reported a four-fold revenue increase from 2024 to 2025 and is now scaling its second-generation Modalix chip and the Palette Neat software environment for drones, humanoid robots and automotive applications. Funds will be used to bring a next-generation hardware design delivering 1,000 dense TOPS to market in early 2028 and to expand the open-source software stack that lets developers specify speed, power and accuracy constraints. SiMa.ai positions its pin-compatible module as a drop-in alternative to Nvidia's Jetson line, aiming to capture a share of the projected $50 trillion physical-AI market. Robotics. Feather Robotics raised $7.6 million in a pre-seed SAFE round led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Builder Capital, Geometry, Virgo VC and London-listed SEED Innovations, whose earlier $1 million investment converts at a $60 million valuation cap [2]. The East Palo Alto startup offers a modular humanoid platform priced at $29,990, paired with an SDK that lets developers load any AI model, and has already generated over $1 million in revenue from manufacturing and food-service customers. Feather's rapid development cycle - first prototype in two months and first shipped unit in nine - aims to establish an open hardware standard for physical-intelligence robots, positioning the company against vertically integrated rivals such as Tesla and Figure AI. India-based Unbox Robotics secured $28 million in a mixed primary-secondary round led by ICICI Venture, with participation from RedStart Labs, F-Prime, 3one4 Capital, Navam Capital, Force Ventures and existing backers [5]. The funding will expand the engineering team, accelerate product development and broaden market reach in India and overseas, while part of the secondary capital provides liquidity to employees. Unbox builds modular, AI-driven mobile robots for parcel and package sorting, deploying around 500 units across Europe and preparing its first large-scale U.S. rollout with a third-party logistics provider. The company's swarm-intelligence software enables coordinated robot fleets, and it pursues additional opportunities in pharma manufacturing. Humanoid-robot specialist Figure AI, valued at $39 billion after its September 2025 Series C, reported that its robot headcount surpassed its human staff for the first time in June 2026, with roughly 740 Figure units deployed against about 660 employees [7]. The firm's flagship Figure 03, launched in October 2025, is a 5-foot-8, 135-pound biped equipped with the in-house Helix vision-language-action model and is currently used in BMW's Spartanburg plant for vehicle assembly. Figure generates revenue through a robot-as-a-service model priced around $3,200 per robot per month and bulk purchases near $89,000 per unit, though exact figures are undisclosed. Investors in the latest round include Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield, Nvidia, Qualcomm Ventures and other strategic capital partners.