Rerun Launches $17 M Seed to Supercharge Open‑Source AI Platform for Robots, Drones & Cars
Rerun’s Mission: Making AI Skies, Streets, and My Real Life Feel Like Home
Picture a future where your AI doesn’t just think in the cloud: it hops into a car, flies a drone, or gears up a robot cleaner. The problem? The code that lives up there needs a solid foot‑in‑the‑ground connection, and right now that link feels more like a bumpy road than a smooth highway. That’s where Rerun, the Stockholm‑based dev‑tools startup, steps in—armed with a $17 M seed round that finally puts all of its $20.2 M in funding on a concrete footing.
Why It Matters
CEO Nikolaus West says it’s no secret that physical AI is exploding. But existing data stacks are either geared toward the sky (cloud, images, models) or the ground (robotics tools). Neither knows the other. That mismatch produces a painful friction for teams trying to blend machine‑learning elegance with the real‑world mess.
What Rerun Brings to the Table
- Everything multimodal, thing‑among‑sth—video streams, 3D scans, and all those fancy tensors that make AI feel like it’s talking.
- Visualization tools that let developers debug like detectives, tracing every bot hop back to why it turned left at that weird intersection.
- Integrated data pipelines that pull in live sensor feeds, turning scrawled code into polished spatial insights.
Data Flywheel: The Sweet Spot
West paints a picture of a virtuous cycle: smarter systems = more robots deployed = more raw data = better models. It sounds like a machine‑learning fairy tale, but the real magic happens only if developers have the right tools to keep that cycle humming.
Calling All AI Teams
“If your AI is meant to walk the streets, it deserves infrastructure that doesn’t break mid‑stride,” West emphasizes. Rerun’s platform is not a stopgap—it’s the backbone that lets machine learning and robotics march forward in sync.
A Quick Rundown of the Funding
- Seed round led by Germany’s Point Nine
- Rerun’s total funding now hits $20.2 M
- Focused on creating “physical AI” solutions that work in real time
In short, Rerun is turning the messy intersection of cloud and concrete into a smooth, data‑rich avenue, and with fresh capital, it’s poised to help AI developers finally get their models out of the lab and onto the streets.
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Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda
Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise.
Rerun: The Open-Source AI Visualizer Shredding the Status Quo
When you think of companies that love harnessing the power of physical AI, you might picture a few tight‑knit labs or a handful of start‑ups that quietly grind away behind closed doors. Rerun, however, flipped that script by exploding the scene with open‑source magic that’s already getting the tech giants’ eyes wide open.
How Rerun’s Visuals Are Making Waves
- Meta, Google, Hugging Face, and Unitree are already cherry‑picking checks from Rerun’s open‑source library to show off live AI behavior.
- These projects have become enough of a showcase that the big players can literally “plug‑in” and start visualising complex motion data without building the whole pipeline from scratch.
It’s like giving a shiny set of Lego blocks that anyone can snap together into a masterpiece. The best part? It’s free and open source, which is a win for developers and a headline‑grabber for the venture community.
A Team Built on Silicon Valley Legends
Behind the scenes is a squad of seasoned veterans who’ve danced through Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly, and Zipline. CTO Emil Ernerfeldt, a bleeding‑edge Rust aficionado, also slammed together egui—the most popular open‑source GUI toolkit in the Rust ecosystem. His brainchild isn’t just a tool; it’s a revolution for developers looking for smooth, invisible UI bridges.
Funding Explosion – One of Europe’s Largest Seed Rounds Yet
The startup’s current funding shell shockingly outstripped the typical European seed round.
- Point Nine – A bold partner, led by partner Ricardo Sequerra Amram, who praised Rerun for winning “the trust of the most ambitious companies in the world of physical AI”.
- Sunflower Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and Seedcamp also joined the round, indicating a full-blown belief in Rerun’s runaway potential.
Why It Matters
With a seed round this big, Rerun gets the capital to scale its open‑source contributions and breakthroughs. The reputation of AI producers like Meta and Google is now lightly resting on a project born out of open collaboration. This partnership not only boosts Rerun’s visibility but gives the tech community a living, breathing tool to see what an AI’s inner workings look like.
So grab your bookmarks, snack on some popcorn, and watch as Rerun keeps rewriting the playbook for open‑source AI visualization. The future is now, and it’s free, open, and downright exciting.
