As generative AI increasingly steps into the physical world — powering robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drones — developers face a growing challenge: aligning cloud-based AI models with real-world environments. The gap between digital code and physical execution is often riddled with friction. That’s exactly where Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, wants to make a difference.
Rerun just secured $17 million in seed funding to advance its specialized data stack for physical AI development — helping AI teams navigate the complex path from “code to road.” This latest round, led by Germany’s Point Nine, brings the 2022-founded startup’s total funding to $20.2 million.
According to Nikolaus West, Rerun’s co-founder and CEO, the need for such infrastructure is growing fast. “The existing AI data infrastructure doesn’t understand physical AI data,” West explained. “And traditional robotics tools aren’t built for the machine learning world. Trying to mix the two creates a massive bottleneck for teams.”
Rerun’s platform is designed specifically for physical AI workflows, capable of managing multimodal data like video streams, 3D scenes, and tensors — all critical components when AI systems interact with the physical world. What sets Rerun apart is its ability to provide visual debugging and spatial analytics, allowing developers to trace a robot’s real-world actions back through the data to understand where failures occur.
“The smarter these systems get, the more robots we can deploy — which generates even more data to train the AI further,” West added, describing a potential “data flywheel” effect. “But first, developers need the right tools to handle this kind of data at scale.”
Rerun’s open-source platform is already making waves. Its physical AI visualizations have been integrated into projects by major players such as Meta, Google, Hugging Face, and robotics company Unitree — a strong signal of early adoption in the developer community.
The team behind Rerun brings experience from top companies like Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly, and Zipline. Notably, Rerun’s CTO Emil Ernerfeldt is also the creator of egui, the largest open-source GUI framework written in Rust — a testament to the startup’s deep technical roots.
The round’s lead investor, Ricardo Sequerra Amram of Point Nine, highlighted Rerun’s open-source strength as a key reason for backing the company. “Their work has earned the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the physical AI space,” Amram said in a statement.
Other participants in the round include Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp.
With fresh capital in hand, Rerun is now poised to play a critical role in solving one of the emerging challenges in AI, building the data tools necessary for AI to truly thrive in the physical world.
