Tera Raises $7.8M Co-Led by Felicis and Inovia to Provide Superhuman Visual Navigation for Robots

SAN FRANCISCO, March 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Tera AI, which has been working in stealth on its spatial reasoning AI for the past year, has raised a $7.8 million seed round co-led by Felicis and Inovia Capital, with participation from Caltech + Wilson Hill, and Naval Ravikant. The company is developing a unique software-only solution to solve general-purpose navigation for autonomous hardware like robots.

"Spatial reasoning is one of those innate skills humans have that's really underappreciated and missing in foundation models today," said Tony Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Tera AI. "Most robots today lack the ability to move between physical environments, and 99% of autonomous systems use little to no AI for Navigation. Humans can easily navigate between indoor and outdoor places with just our eyes. Our brain passively builds internal models of the outside world, which we can reuse years later to recognize exactly where we are. We can read a map we've never seen and use it to navigate a maze-like indoor space. At Tera AI, we believe zero-shot navigation for robots is a problem that software-alone can solve."

Tera AI was founded by Zhang, who previously led ML at Google X, and has a team of AI and simulation researchers from Google AI, Caltech, MIT, and the European Space Agency. While everyone has been focused on LLMs the past two years, Zhang and his team have developed a novel way for an AI system to teach itself spatial reasoning. Zhang did his PhD at Caltech with Pietro Perona, an early godfather of computer vision, developing theories of how biology solved navigation in a general-purpose way.

"What's unique about Tera is not just their fundamental breakthroughs in spatial AI research, but also powerful robotics partners that need what they are building yesterday," said Viviana Faga, Partner at Felicis. "It's the deep dual focus on groundbreaking research and a sharpened product focus that will position them to redefine what people think robots can do in the near term."

"AI's next frontier goes beyond text to understanding and acting in the physical world. Advances in 'world reasoning' and edge-based inference are making that a reality," said Steve Woods, CTO at Inovia. "Tera AI is at the cutting edge of applying AI to solve fundamental challenges in navigation and perception."

Tera will use the funding to deploy the initial solution into real embedded devices this year and will be growing the technical team across both product and research.

To learn more about Tera please visit tera-ai.com

About Tera
Tera is developing a platform-agnostic, software-only spatial reasoning system that enables any robot to navigate its surroundings with its own camera. Developed by a team of leading ML researchers, Tera aims to help robots navigate new environments similar to how humans can – with no prior setup or additional sensors and external signals from the environment. Tera has received funding from Felicis, Inovia, Caltech + Wilson Hill, and Naval Ravikant and is based in the Bay Area.

About Felicis
Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and currently manages over $3B in capital across 9 funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 50 companies valued at $1B+. More than 100 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen (IPO), Credit Karma (acq by Intuit), Cruise (acq by General Motors), Fitbit (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Meraki (acq by Cisco), Ring (acq by Amazon), and Shopify (IPO). The firm is based in Menlo Park and San Francisco in California. Learn more at felicis.com.

About Inovia
Inovia Capital is Canada's leading full-stack software investor, partnering with founders to build impactful and enduring global companies. With three investment strategies—Discovery, Venture, and Growth—the team leverages an operator-led mindset to provide founders with multi-stage support, mentorship, and access to a worldwide network. Inovia manages over US$2.5B with operations in Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Calgary, Bay Area, and London. For more information, visit inovia.vc.

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SOURCE Tera AI