NVIDIA Scientist Sanja Fidler Launches Robotics Startup Veeda

On August 19, prominent AI researcher and senior NVIDIA scientist Sanja Fidler announced the founding of Veeda (@VeedaAI) with longtime collaborators Zan Gojcic and Huan Ling; the company emerged from stealth the next day with backing from Khosla Ventures, Radical Ventures and others. Veeda targets the Physical AI space with a distinct technical bet: multimodal foundation world models that simulate physical reality as training grounds for embodied intelligence.

Confirmed

• Founding team of three: Sanja Fidler, Zan Gojcic and Huan Ling, all longtime collaborators, the first two from NVIDIA; industry figures such as Erwin Coumans shared the news.
• The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, Radical Ventures and others, and formally launched on August 20.
• Direction: building multimodal foundation world models that simulate physical reality, turning generative world models into training grounds for physical intelligence; the company argues physical AI should be trained in simulation rather than the real world.
• Core thesis: the scaling moment for Physical AI will come from robot–world interaction and an explosion of robot data; embodied intelligence will not be achieved by imitation learning alone.
• Product form: high-fidelity virtual interactive "playgrounds" where physical agents can perceive, reason, act and learn at scale for high-stakes real-world scenarios.
• Vision: reshaping logistics, manufacturing and how the physical world operates; the team believes robots will transform the world.
• Reception: MPI professor Michael J. Black congratulated VeedaAI, calling it the right vision and team.

Unconfirmed

• Some reports (m3's "former DeepMind researcher", m10 author Viktor Makoviichuk mentioning ex-Googlers among founders) conflict with the mainstream three-person NVIDIA lineage; the full founding roster and backgrounds await official confirmation.

Why it matters

• Fidler joins a wave of senior NVIDIA robotics researchers turning founders, signaling Physical AI as a post-LLM hotspot already attracting top-tier venture capital.
• Unlike the mainstream imitation-learning-plus-real-robot-data route, Veeda bets on generative world models as robot training environments; if it works, it could sharply cut real-world data costs and accelerate embodied-AI scaling.

2026-08-19 ~ 2026-08-20 · 11 related posts

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