Investors are aggressively courting AI researchers to create startups that can make AI more reliable and efficient.
yu suan Ohio State professor who runs a lab of artificial intelligence agents, said he initially resisted pressure from venture capitalists to commercialize his work. He finally took the leap last year and turned his work into a startup when he saw that advances in the fundamental model could make agents truly personalized.
NeoCognition, a startup that Su describes as a research lab that develops self-learning AI agents, just emerged from stealth with $40 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners and angels including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.
“Today’s agents are generalists,” Su (pictured left) told TechCrunch. “Every time you ask them to do a task, you take a leap of faith.”
According to Su, the problem lies in the lack of consistency. Current agents, whether from Claude Code, OpenClaw or Perplexity’s computing tools, successfully complete tasks as planned only about 50% of the time, he said.
Because agents are still so untrustworthy, they are not ready to be trusted freelancers, Su told TechCrunch. NeoCognition aims to change that by developing an agent system that can learn on its own to become an expert in any domain, similar to how humans learn.
His argues that while human intelligence is broad, its true power is our ability to specialize. When we enter a new environment or profession, we can quickly master its unique rules, relationships, and consequences.
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NeoCognition is creating agents that mirror this exact process.
“For humans, our continuous learning process is essentially the process of building a world model for any profession, any environment,” Su said. “We believe that for agents to become experts, they must autonomously learn to build a model of any given microworld.”
Su sees this ability for rapid specialization as the critical missing link in making AI work reliably on its own.
While agents can be trained for autonomous tasks, they must be tailored for a specific vertical. NeoCognition is different because they are generalist construction agents capable of self-learning and specializing in any domain.
NeoCognition intends to sell its agent systems to companies, including established SaaS companies, that can use them to create agent-workers or enhance existing product offerings.
His highlighted that an investment from Vista Equity Partners is especially valuable for this reason. As one of the largest private equity firms in the software space, Vista can provide NeoCognition with direct access to a broad portfolio of companies looking to modernize their products with AI.
NeoCognition currently has about 15 employees, most of whom have PhDs.
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