Investors are aggressively attracting AI researchers to build startups that can make AI more reliable and efficient.
Yo suAn Ohio State professor who leads an artificial intelligence lab, he said he initially resisted pressure from venture capital firms to commercialize his work. He finally took the leap last year and turned his business into a startup when he saw that advancements in the enterprise model could make agents truly personal.
NeoCognition, a startup that Su describes as a research lab that develops self-learning AI agents, has just come out of stealth with $40 million in seed funding. The round was jointly led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners and angels, including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.
“Today’s agents are generalists,” Su (pictured left) told TechCrunch. “Every time you ask them to do a task, you take a leap of faith.”
According to Su, the problem is inconsistency. Existing agents, whether from Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Perplexity’s computer tools, successfully complete tasks as intended only about 50% of the time.
“Since agents are still not trusted, they are not willing to trust them, or freelancers,” Su told TechCrunch. NeoCognition intends to change that by developing an agent system that can self-learn to become an expert in any field, similar to the way humans learn.
Su argues that although human intelligence is broad, its real strength lies in our ability to specialize. When we enter a new environment or profession, we can quickly master its unique rules, relationships, and consequences.
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NeoCognition builds agents that reflect exactly this process.
“For humans, our continuous learning process is essentially a process of building a universal model for any profession, for any environment,” Su said. “We believe that in order for agents to become experts, they must learn independently to build a model of any given small world.”
Su sees this ability to specialize rapidly as the crucial missing link to making AI work reliably on its own.
While it is possible to train agents for autonomous tasks, they must be tailored to a specific sector. NeoCognition is different because it builds general agents capable of self-learning and specialization in any field.
NeoCognition intends to sell its agent systems to enterprises, including established SaaS companies, which can use them to build working agents or to enhance existing product offerings.
Su stressed that the investment from Vista Equity Partners is particularly valuable for this reason. As one of the largest private equity firms in software, Vista can provide NeoCognition direct access to a wide range of companies looking to modernize their products with AI.
NeoCognition currently has about 15 employees, most of whom have PhDs.
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