Group update

The funding will advance its mission of building digital humans — machines designed to embody every fundamental human quality

Prosus Ventures leads US$30 million in a Series A funding round in Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera.AL), an applied AI research company building long-term autonomous, collaborative AI agents, with participation from a16z Speedrun, Patron, First Spark, Factorial, VamosVentures, and angels including Patrick Collison and more. The investment will enable the company to further advance its research, expand its team, and solidify its position as a leader in next-generation, agent-first products.

From Simulations to Real-World Problem Solving

Co-founded and led by AI researcher and computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang – formerly a faculty at MIT – alongside a founding team of AI researchers and programming medalists from MIT, Stanford, Google X, Citadel, and more, Fundamental Research Labs is reimagining how humans interact with artificial intelligence. The company develops agents with true autonomy, built to operate and collaborate across complex long-term tasks.

Fundamental’s early research began with agents trained in collaborative gaming environments like Minecraft and Roblox, where millions of users interacted with them. They then took it a step further with Project Sid, the world’s first agent civilization, featuring 1,000 autonomous agents working together for hours to complete tasks more effectively than they could individually.

Fundamental brought its agents from games to the general computer at the end of 2024. Its performance on OSWorld, the most difficult and general computer-use agent benchmark, reached 48.45%, nearly double the performance of the other top labs at the time.

Turning AI Breakthroughs Into Everyday Autonomous Tools

Today, the company is focused on advancing multi-agent systems and bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world products. That vision took a major leap forward in 2025 with the launch of Fairies, a general-purpose AI agent that runs directly on users’ desktops to automate everyday tasks.

“Few startups are working on advancing general AI agent capabilities through fundamental research,” said Dr. Robert Yang, CEO and co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs. “Our mission is to deliver research breakthroughs that lead to increasingly impactful products. As our agents improve, classical methods of alignment will no longer be enough. We are learning from how humans build collaborative relationships and civilization.”

Most recently, the team launched Shortcut, the first Superhuman Excel agent. It’s already solving championship level cases in under 10 minutes with over 80% accuracy, 10x faster than humans. It edits, builds models, and scales fast. Thousands have tested it, and after an initial waitlist of over 20,000, the company announced public access in July 2025. In recent blind studies against first-year analysts at firms like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, Shortcut outperformed in 89% of cases, as judged by managers at those very firms.

“We’re excited to back Fundamental Research Labs in its mission to bring AI agents out of the sandbox and into the real world,” said Sandeep Bakshi, Investment Partner at Prosus Ventures. “Grounded in human neuroscience and driven by the ambition to build digital humans, their work has huge potential to change how humans interact with machines. At Prosus Ventures, we look to back entrepreneurs with unchained ambition — and Fundamental is building something truly transformative and boundless. We're thrilled to be part of the journey and support Robert, Nico, Shuying and the whole team.”

This round follows a US$9 million seed round raised in May 2024, co-led by First Spark Ventures and Patron, with participation from a16z SPEEDRUN. This brings the company’s total funding to over US$40 million.

About Fundamental Research Labs

Fundamental Research Labs is building digital humans—machines with the capacity to learn, care, and grow alongside humans. The company is an applied research organization developing autonomous, collaborative, and socially intelligent agents. Its team includes computational neuroscientists, AI researchers, engineers, and builders from MIT EECS, the Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, and other leading institutions. Fundamental Research Labs began with multi-agent prototypes in environments like Minecraft and Roblox, where over a million people have interacted with its agents. Today, the company is bringing those agents into the real world—starting with the computer. Fundamental is backed by leading global investors including Prosus Ventures, a16z SPEEDRUN, First Spark Ventures, and Patron. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. fundamentalresearchlabs.ai/