Airtree has pumped $5 million into Adelaide’s Metacognition, bringing the AI startup’s pre-seed round to a huge $15 million.
Earlier this month Adelaide’s Metacognition released an open-source AI for robotic navigation that beat models from Chinese giant Alibaba and France’s Mistral in simulated tests. It is proof, co-founder Anton van den Hengel says, that Australia can be more than a home for data centres.
“We can do foundational AI in Australia, we can turn cutting-edge AI into economic value in Australia,” van den Hengel said. “Are we just a real estate transaction on the side of somebody else’s growth, or are we actually going to participate in the core of that process? My vote is strongly for the latter.”
Airtree, one of Australia’s biggest venture capital firms, is casting its vote in that direction too. It has invested $5 million into Metacognition, bringing the AI lab’s pre-seed funding to $15 million after an initial $10 million from Main Sequence.
In absolute terms, there is little notable about an AI startup raising $15 million. But that number is astronomical for a pre-seed round – which is almost as early as “early-stage” investing gets. It is nearly 10-times the 2026 median of $1.6 million, and van den Hengel calls it “walking around money” compared to what the startup will soon need.
“We’re hiring 20 people, and 90 per cent of them have PhDs, but if we’re going to get to the point where we’ve got 100 people, which is what you really need to be able to compete, then we’re going to have to raise a lot more.”
Metacognition earlier this month released NavGPT-3, an open-source vision-language model it says allows robots to interpret verbal commands and navigate environments. It combines two types of AI – reasoning and navigation – to achieve that. Benchmarking tests showed the AI enabled more reliable navigation than competing tech from $360 billion tech giant Alibaba and France’s $24 billion Mistral startup.
Its strongest results were achieved by integrating frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic to provide the reasoning, but even its model on its own scored higher than the competition.
Metacognition’s animating premise is that robots will be a growing presence in homes and industry in the coming years – but only if people and businesses can trust them. It is bad when ChatGPT hallucinates misinformation, but the stakes are fundamentally higher for robots that can wreak havoc in the physical world.
Metacognition is seeking to develop the “operating system” for robots – the AI layer that lets robots understand commands and erects guardrails designed to stop unsafe or counterproductive actions. Just like computer makers flock to Microsoft’s Windows, Metacognition’s ambition is to provide software for robotics manufacturers around the globe.
“If all we do is keep the lights on for models trained elsewhere, the value walks out the door with the tenants,” says Airtree co-founder Craig Blair. “We don’t need to win everything, but we do need to be in the game, which means backing the people building the missing pieces.”
Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed? Tap here to make Forbes Australia a preferred source on Google.
Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world. Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here or become a member here.
