Vantora, formerly UP.Labs, raises $100M to build proprietary physical AI startups

Four years ago, a startup lab called UP.Labs launched with a model that wasn’t quite an incubator, accelerator, or venture firm: it built startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers such as Alaska Airlines and Porsche, as well as for the outside world. The firm, now renamed Vantora, still works with corporate customers — including some new ones in industrial manufacturing that it declined to name, and in the oil and gas sector — but has raised $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, its first outside investment since launching in 2022 with Porsche as its first corporate partner.

Vantora is now more focused on building startups solely for its corporate customers rather than the broader market. Founder and CEO John Kuolt told TechCrunch that Vantora is moving toward a “proprietary M&A pipeline”: the firm still builds startups for corporate partners, who invest in the ventures and serve as their first customers, but those partners now have the option to fold the startups into their core businesses and keep them to themselves. That shift has driven Vantora’s increased focus on physical AI startups, according to Kuolt. In the past, Vantora would end up shelving ideas that were strategic to corporate partners but too sensitive to bring to the outside world — missing, in Kuolt’s words, “the biggest value problems, which had the biggest upside because of that.” He gave the example of a Fortune 100 industrial company needing to retrofit its hardware and machines for autonomy: “You need to own that, it needs to be sovereign, and you can’t rely on a third party to go do that for you… They’re never going to let us go sell that to their competitors.”

The proprietary model has already unlocked new physical AI use cases with existing customers, according to Kuolt — including an idea for partner J.B. Hunt that the firm had previously passed on because the client said there was no way to take it to the broader market. Vantora has launched several startups for Porsche since 2022 and struck deals with Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash, and TDG, the parent of Ashley Furniture. In its early days, UP.Labs was informally tied — though never financially — to venture firm Up.Partners; Vantora still shares office space with the California-based VC but operates as its own entity.

Why it matters

By letting corporate partners fold spun-out startups back into their own businesses instead of selling to the broader market, Vantora is betting that physical AI’s biggest opportunities are proprietary problems too sensitive for a normal venture-backed startup to tackle.