A startup that builds other startups raised $100M, and is all-in on physical AI

Vantora, the company once known as UP.Labs, has taken a new step in a strange corner of startup culture: building startups for other companies, then giving those companies a shot at keeping the results. The firm just raised $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, its first outside investment, and it’s using the money to push harder into physical AI.

That change comes with a more explicit business model. Vantora still works with corporate partners, but now the startups it creates are aimed less at the open market and more at the customers paying for them. Founder and CEO John Kuolt called it a move toward a “proprietary M&A pipeline,” where partners can fold a startup into their own business instead of sending it out into the wild.

That matters because Vantora says it had been passing on some of its biggest ideas. Kuolt said the firm would sometimes kill projects that were strategically important to its partners but too sensitive to release publicly. In his telling, that meant missing the highest-value problems, including the sort of industrial autonomy work that requires a company to own the intelligence layer itself.

The firm’s customer list already shows where it’s headed. Vantora launched in 2022 with Porsche as its first corporate partner, and has since built startups for Porsche and struck deals with Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash, and TDG, the parent of Ashley Furniture. It also works with unnamed companies in industrial manufacturing and oil and gas. One example Kuolt gave: an AI idea for J.B. Hunt that the company said could not be taken to the broader world, which now fits the new model.

Vantora is also no longer UP.Labs in name, though the old setup still lingers in the background. It was once tied to venture firm Up.Partners, but Kuolt says it is now its own entity, even if it still shares office space with the California-based VC. The new capital, he said, is the company’s first outside money.