Michael Calvey

I’m excited to announce that @antiochrobotics has raised $8.5m to natively integrate AI into the robotics and autonomy development process, the way coding agents like @cursor_ai have done for software systems. Physical AI is the next frontier — it’s where we will see the biggest impact from the rollout of AI on the world around us. While software engineering is almost unrecognizable from 10 years ago due to how agents have changed the game, the same shift hasn’t happened yet for the development of physical systems. Why is this so much harder with physical systems? In software, a closed-loop feedback system is possible by definition. Agents that implement changes can validate their work in realtime and keep iterating. With the development of autonomous systems, the feedback loop still relies on slow and costly real-world testing. No matter how much development is accelerated with AI, with testing as the bottleneck there’s a limit to how fast teams can go. Antioch gives agents a physically-accurate, photorealistic simulation harness to run rapid experiments and validate physical systems at scale. A hardware tradeoff analysis comparing two components, a new firmware release improving the sensor fusion pipeline, or a new image intelligence layer deployed on the edge can now be validated in near real time. With a live feedback loop, agents will soon iterate on physical systems in a closed loop. It’s been a pleasure building another company with @AlexLangshur and @HarryMellsop , and I’ve loved getting to know my new co-founders @colton_swingle and @CollinSchlager. We’ve built a killer team and are moving fast. If the thought of being part of this excites you, please reach out.

@bscholl isn’t that just pragmatism though?

“You can’t afford to be ideological about energy in this hard power world.” Actually the problem is a toxic ideology that wants to reverse human technological progress. We need to be ideological about energy: vehemently in favor of abundance.

@songjunkr it definitely makes me less paranoid about my machine. peace of mind = worth it. haven’t had to use it yet…

방금 전재산을 털어서 Macbook M5 Max 128GB를 샀어. $400를 내고 AppleCare+에 가입하는게 좋을까?

@BaslyAsma working on some of these problems @antiochrobotics

Talked to more than 30 founders and builders in the physical AI space this week some issues that are mentioned the most: -> iteration loops are very ad-hoc and slow -> sim2real inconsistency is yet to be solved -> data QA and Evals are still unresolved

@Teknium well deserved

Hermes Agent just hit 100,000 stars on GitHub!!! Thank you everyone!!

@aphysicist you have to extremely aggressively police your algorithm. personally i will respond “not interested” for: - any ai copypasta slop - any videos whatsoever - divisive political content - anything that’s entertaining without being genuinely informative works consistently

the algorithm on here is going through another awful cycle of shifting attention to slop. you can feel it like the tide when it happens. everyone posting actual good content gets drained and that attention gets moved to garbage.

@caglakaymaz @AlexLangshur @HarryMellsop @colton_swingle @CollinSchlager 🚀

Pumped to partner with @AlexLangshur, @HarryMellsop, @colton_swingle, @CollinSchlager, and @michaeljcalvey. LFG 🚀

@Willob huge, congrats @Willob and team! it’s time to reindustrialize

Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism. We are building The Ocean Company. The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told. It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that powers our world. And the key to the health of our planet. This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it. We are building it. And we need more builders Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers

@JustAsAiCi @TechCrunch exactly the idea!

@TechCrunch Interesting concept bridging code-like interfaces with real-world AI could really change how we interact with hardware.

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

Stoked to be featured in techcrunch! Check out the story below, it’s the right time to be in physical AI

@antiochrobotics @Category_VC @A_StarVC @MaCVentureCap @AbstractVC @BoxGroup @IcehouseVenture 🚀 time to go faster!

We’ve raised $8.5M in seed funding, valuing Antioch at $60M, to build the simulation platform for physical autonomy. The raise was led by @Category_VC and @A_StarVC, with participation from @MaCVentureCap, @AbstractVC, @BoxGroup, @IcehouseVenture, and angels. Antioch brings robotics and autonomy development entirely into simulation. Teams build, iterate, and test their full autonomous stacks in a single platform, accelerated by agents with native understanding of 3D environments. We're doing for physical autonomy what coding agents have done for software development. When the entire development loop lives in simulation, engineers and agents can reason about a robotic stack the same way they reason about a codebase: run it, observe the result, and iterate. The funding will go toward further expanding the engineering team, the core simulation infrastructure, and our new agentic framework. TechCrunch covered the raise and what we’re building: techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/thi… If you’re an exceptional engineer interested in redefining autonomy development, we’d love to chat: antioch.com/careers.

@tobi @panaikk 🫡

The QMD industrial complex grows stronger

@songjunkr performance-wise, how would you characterize the results you get from GLM5.1 vs minimax m2.7 vs gemma? on a 128gb mac with m4 max, which would you suggest i use?

로컬LLM 기기를 위한 두가지 선택지 - 엔비디아 GPU : 작은 모델을 빠르게 돌리고싶다 - 고용량 램을 가진 맥 : 큰모델을 느리게 돌리고싶다 현재 오픈소스 중 가장 강력한 모델들 GLM5.1 / minimax m2.7은 클라우드 sota에 근접한 성능이여서, 개인적으로는 맥을 선호합니다.

> boarding flight > no starlink dish sad

@bznotes exactly our thesis @antiochrobotics. some very exciting things in the works!

The robotics field is going through a massive transformation. Until very recently, robots were mostly hardware with embedded software devices, and their interactions/motion-planning etc were hard-coded. Robots were seen as devices doing singular/repeat tasks that humans would get tired of doing. AI is rapidly changing that! But we are still early, and in development - though progress is happening really fast across all layers of the stack. Some people may have unrealistic expectations in the short term, but the long term arc has definitely changed, and is so exciting! And when this new tech gets deployed at scale, it will create a revolution! Can’t wait.

The obvious case for simulation is developing a new system faster. The case that gets less attention — and that we've come to appreciate deeply working with teams shipping at scale — is simulation against autonomous systems that are already widely deployed. Once a system runs at scale, the calculus of change inverts. Retuning a control loop deep in the stack sounds minor, but it has to be validated across the full range of conditions the product has met in the field. That cost is often prohibitive, so the change doesn't ship. This loss doesn't show up on any dashboard. A 5% detection lift no one can validate, or a firmware tuning pass that would benefit the entire installed base, sits on the shelf. The real cost of leaving a working system alone is the opportunity cost of improvements that never get made. Running the full stack in sim changes what's possible. When the actual production software runs on top of a high-fidelity hardware model, changes to a deployed system surfaces its regressions in sim the same way it would in the field. We’re building Antioch for this. Production code runs in sim the same way it runs on the hardware, so a change validated in sim carries over to the field.

greatest to ever do it.

@BaslyAsma Hey! Building the sim & testing stack for companies shipping autonomous systems. Let’s chat

I’m talking to all kind of folks working on robotics, any moots who works ( or can introduce me to someone ) at robotics companies who want to grab coffee ( on me :) ) I’d love to talk to anyone involved in training robotics foundational models

@Willob 📈

Q1 revenue numbers are in. It was our best quarter yet. Nearly more than our entire year last year. And still, I think all other quarters this year will outperform this one. I think we are onto something....

@vishivishx @keerthanpg it’s a very exciting time to be in the space. you’re right! it feels like everything is about to happen. the tech is finally good enough, just need to piece the right bits together.

@keerthanpg Robotics looks like the next AI-adjacent field that's ripe for disruption from Frontier AI ideas - it's been a long time coming :)

There are really few (< 15) people in the world who know both frontier modeling AND modern robotics very well. A lot of strong roboticists are still working off of ideas from the pre-2023, pre-Gemini era of robotics and know very little about frontier AI techniques. A lot of strong frontier modeling people do not care yet / have little expertise in robotics. The latter group is increasing as more of the big AI labs are foraying into robotics but still the world needs a lot more :)