One of the largest seed rounds ever raised by a Canadian company is backing a bet that robots should learn in simulation. Veeda AI, founded by Sanja Fidler weeks after she left Nvidia, closed more than $90M in financing from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, according to The Logic and corporate filings.
Fidler ran Nvidia’s Toronto research unit for eight years, rising to vice president of AI research while teaching computer science at the University of Toronto, and helped found the Vector Institute. Her co-founders, Huan Ling and Zan Gojcic, came out of Nvidia’s Spatial Intelligence Lab.
Veeda, incorporated in June, is building multimodal world models that generate high-fidelity simulated environments where embodied agents practice skills through interaction. Real-world trial and error is dangerous and slow, the company argues, so robots should rehearse in virtual spaces instead. It calls the approach building the Matrix for physical AI.
Khosla and Radical have backed this thesis before, co-leading Jeff Dean’s Discovery Loop round this month and backing World Labs and Decart. The category’s checks run large, including the $1.03B Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs raised, but Veeda’s founders say their seed will fund the two things that matter most: research talent and compute.
