According to monitoring by Beating, AI research lab NeoCognition has announced the completion of a $40 million seed round financing, emerging from stealth mode. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and was co-founded by Ohio State University associate professor Yu Su along with Xiang Deng and Yu Gu. This round was oversubscribed, with Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures leading the investment, and Vista Equity Partners participating. Angel investors include Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks co-founder and executive chairman Ion Stoica, as well as AI researchers Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. NeoCognition aims to address the reliability of AI agents. Founder Yu Su stated that the current success rate of AI agents completing tasks as expected is only about 50%, making each execution feel like a roll of the dice. The company's approach is to enable agents to autonomously build a 'world model' in their respective fields through actual use, capturing the rules, relationships, and constraints of specific business environments, allowing for rapid specialization on the job rather than relying on generic pre-training. Before ChatGPT, Yu Su established an LLM agent research lab at Ohio State University, with the team's previous notable works including Mind2Web, MMMU, and SeeAct. The business model targets the enterprise sector, primarily serving SaaS companies by helping them embed continuously improving AI employees into their own products and operational processes. Vista Equity Partners, which holds a significant number of enterprise software companies, views its investment as a distribution channel. The team consists of about 15 members, most of whom hold doctoral degrees, and there are currently no publicly available products.