NeoCognition Emerges from Stealth With $40 Million Seed Round to Advance Specialized Intelligence and Expert Agents

Founded by the research team behind one of the most established AI agent labs in the country, NeoCognition aims to build agents that learn on the job to become specialized experts.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NeoCognition, a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, today announced its emergence from stealth 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 and others. Angel investors and founding advisors include Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, Ion Stoica, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks, A&E Investments, Salience Capital Partners, Nepenthe Capital, Frontiers Capital, and leading AI researchers like Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer, among others.

Yu Su, CEO and Co-Founder at NeoCognition and Sloan Research Fellow, leads one of the most established AI agent labs in the country at the Ohio State University. Su's team began developing large language model-based agents well before the ChatGPT moment. Over the years, they contributed a series of seminal and award-winning work, such as Mind2Web, MMMU, and SeeAct, that helped lay the foundation of the modern AI agent field. Research from their team is widely used in every frontier large language model from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

"Dr. Su and his team have already developed research that spans every piece of the agent puzzle, ranging from perception to memory, planning, evaluation, and safety," said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Managing Partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures. "We are confident NeoCognition is uniquely positioned to tackle the hardest challenges in agentic AI."

Coming out of stealth, NeoCognition's research will create a new class of AI agents that continuously learn the structure, workflows, and constraints of the environments they operate in, and specialize into domain experts by learning a world model of work. In doing so, the expert agents become faster, more cost-effective, and more reliable. Deeper understanding of their environments also enables NeoCognition's agents to be more responsible and safer actors in high-stake settings.

"AI today is fundamentally unreliable when it comes to executing real work that requires deep expertise," said Yu Su. "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."

"As general-purpose agents become table stakes, the key challenge in AI is achieving expert-level intelligence," said Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley Professor and Databricks Co-Founder. "NeoCognition's new approach to building agents that learn to become experts has the potential to reach the level of reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness required for high-stakes applications."

"At the core of NeoCognition is a novel learning mechanism that will allow agents to specialize very quickly," said Landon Downs, Managing Partner at Cambium Capital. "We have strong conviction in the team's expertise and believe their research is charting a new path toward specialized intelligence that will democratize access to frontier agent capabilities."

About NeoCognition
NeoCognition is the AI agent lab for specialized intelligence. Founded by leading AI researchers Yu Su, Xiang Deng, and Yu Gu, the company's mission is to expand access to expertise by developing AI agents that continuously learn to reach expert-level intelligence. The company has $40M in committed seed capital, is backed by world-class researchers, and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

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SOURCE NeoCognition.io