Vantora, formerly known as UP.Labs, raised more than $100 million in growth capital from Silversmith Capital Partners, the company said in a press release, marking its first outside investment since founding in 2022 despite being profitable. TechCrunch independently reported the round.
Founder and CEO John Kuolt built the company around embedding teams of founders and engineers inside industrial enterprises to identify high-value operational problems, then building startups that the corporate partner invests in, uses as a first customer, and can eventually absorb. Vantora has launched 17 ventures for partners including Porsche, Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash and Ashley Furniture parent TDG, and says revenue grew 79% year over year.
Kuolt told TechCrunch the company's shift toward physical AI, including autonomy retrofits for industrial hardware, followed a change to what he called a proprietary M&A pipeline model that let Vantora pursue ideas it previously considered too sensitive to build in public. "The world's largest enterprises are sitting on enormous value disguised as problems," Kuolt said in the funding announcement. "If the intelligence layer of your business is going to be built on your operations and your data, you must own it."
The new funding will go toward expanding corporate partnerships, developing Vantora's data ontology product, COSMOS, and hiring across AI and commercial roles, according to the announcement. Danielle Waldman of Silversmith said Kuolt's team "demonstrated ROI and earned the trust of some of the world's leading industrial enterprises."
Most physical AI funding goes to companies building the hardware or the model. Vantora's bet is that the harder problem is finding which of a corporation's actual operational headaches are worth building an AI product around in the first place, and that a venture studio that has already done that 17 times over has a repeatable edge.