Collin Schlager

This simulation startup wants to be the Cursor for physical AI techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/thi…

Excited to share that we've raised $8.5M in seed funding for @antiochrobotics, led by @A_StarVC and @Category_VC, with participation from @MaCVentureCap, @AbstractVC, @BoxGroup, @IcehouseVenture, and a group of angels we're lucky to have behind us. A year ago, @HarryMellsop, @colton_swingle, @CollinSchlager, @michaeljcalvey, and I started Antioch with a conviction that simulation would become the foundation of how autonomous systems get built and tested. We'd all seen the same thing from different vantage points: teams building fake warehouses and running expensive field trials, spending months calibrating simulated sensors and physics to match real-world behavior, and wrestling with tools like Isaac Sim and Gazebo that were built for researchers, not production engineering teams. We're using the raise to double down on what we think the future of this space actually looks like: autoresearch for physical autonomy. Coding agents work because the feedback loop is tight: write code, run it, observe the result, iterate. Physical autonomy hasn't had that loop because you can't spin up a warehouse on every commit. Simulation gives you exactly that runtime, and we're building the agentic layer on top of it: Antioch lets AI agents reason about robotic systems the same way coding agents reason about a codebase. Onboard a stack, calibrate high-fidelity digital twins, compose dynamic environments, run thousands of scenarios in parallel, and iterate, all without touching hardware.