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ByNN Desk
NeoCognition Raises $40M Seed to Build Human-Like AI Agents
NeoCognition, a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, announced its emergence from stealth April 21 with a $40 million seed funding round.
The Palo Alto-based research lab NeoCognition, spun out of Ohio State University, wants to build AI agents that accumulate domain expertise the way humans do, through continuous learning on the job.
San Francisco-based NeoCognition, a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, announced its emergence from stealth April 21 with a $40 million seed funding round. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners. Angel investors and founding advisors include Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks co-founder and Executive Chairman Ion Stoica, and leading AI researchers Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer, among others.
The company was founded by Yu Su, a Sloan Research Fellow who leads one of the most established AI agent labs in the country at Ohio State University, alongside co-founders Xiang Deng and Yu Gu. Su said he initially resisted VC pressure to commercialize his research, and eventually spun out the work last year after seeing that foundational model advances could make agents genuinely personalized.
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The founding thesis rests on a specific diagnosis of what is broken in current AI systems. According to Su, existing agents, whether from Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Perplexity’s computer tools, successfully complete tasks as intended only about 50% of the time. NeoCognition’s approach addresses this by building agents that continuously learn the structure, workflows, and constraints of the environments they operate in, specializing into domain experts through a working model of their environment, making them faster, more cost-effective, and more reliable over time.
“AI today is fundamentally unreliable when it comes to executing real work that requires deep expertise,” Su said in the company’s press release. “The true power of human intelligence is the ability to continuously learn and specialize. Our approach mirrors how humans gain expertise on the job through building a structured model of their micro-world, and would eliminate the extensive manual customization required by current models.”
NeoCognition intends to sell its agent systems primarily to enterprises, including established SaaS companies that can use them to build agent-workers or enhance existing product offerings. Su highlighted Vista Equity Partners’ involvement as particularly valuable, given the firm’s large portfolio of software companies looking to modernize with AI.
The company is headquartered in Palo Alto and currently has about 15 employees, the majority of whom hold PhDs.
Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information, including a press release issued by NeoCognition via PR Newswire on April 21, 2026. NervNow has not independently verified the claims made therein.
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