London-based Neuracore, a robot learning platform focused on faster scaling and deployment, has closed a $3 million pre-seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Clem Delangue (Co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face) and advisors from academia, hardware, and AI.
Founded in 2024 by Stephen James, Assistant Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London, Neuracore is developing infrastructure designed to support the next generation of intelligent robots. Its platform enables robotics teams to move from data collection to deploying machine learning models in a matter of days rather than months, eliminating the bottlenecks that currently consume up to 80 per cent of engineering time.
Neuracore’s software stack replaces fragmented robotics setups with a unified, cloud-based system that manages asynchronous data collection, visualisation, training, and deployment. By bringing the full robot learning pipeline into a single platform, Neuracore enables teams to focus more on development and experimentation rather than infrastructure.
The platform is already used by more than 50 organisations across commercial and academic robotics, including collaborations with leading hardware manufacturers.
Commenting on the investment, Stephen James, founder and CEO, noted that his experience across academic and industrial robotics showed that teams, from research groups to warehouse automation startups, were repeatedly rebuilding similar infrastructure from the ground up.
Our mission is to eliminate that duplication and democratize access to high-performance robot learning tools. With this funding and our free academic program, we’re enabling both researchers and companies to focus on advancing robotics itself, not on building the pipelines to support it.
Neuracore is also introducing a free academic program alongside the funding. Through this program, universities and research institutions worldwide will receive unrestricted access to the full enterprise platform, the same infrastructure used by Neuracore’s commercial customers.
Academic researchers are building the foundation for tomorrow’s robots. They shouldn’t waste months setting up data pipelines - they should be innovating. We want Neuracore to be the backbone that lets them do that.
James added.
The initiative is intended to reduce the accessibility gap between research and industry by providing universities and robotics labs with free, unlimited use of the platform, supporting faster experimentation, collaboration, and reproducibility across institutions.
The new investment will accelerate product development, expand the engineering team, and support Neuracore’s broader growth, including scaling its open-source robot learning community.
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