Neuracore, the robot learning platform to scale and deploy faster, has closed a $3 million pre-seed funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Clem Delangue (Co-founder & CEO at Hugging Face) and advisors spanning academia, hardware, and AI.
Founded in 2024 by Stephen James, Assistant Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London, Neuracore is building the core infrastructure powering the next generation of intelligent robots. Its platform enables robotics teams to go from data collection to deployed machine learning models in days not months, eliminating the bottlenecks that currently consume up to 80% of engineering time.
The investment will fuel team expansion, accelerate product development, and support Neuracore’s growth. Alongside the funding, Neuracore is launching a free academic program. This program gives universities and research institutions worldwide unrestricted access to the full enterprise platform, or in other words, the same infrastructure used by its commercial customers.
Neuracore’s software stack replaces fragmented “Frankenstein” robotics setups with a unified, cloud-based system that handles asynchronous data collection, visualization, training, and deployment. By integrating the full robot learning pipeline into one platform, Neuracore helps teams focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. The platform is already used by over 50 organizations across commercial and academic robotics, including partnerships with prominent hardware manufacturers.
“Earlybird is the ideal partner for Neuracore,” said Stephen James, Founder and CEO. “Their deep expertise in European deep tech and robotics will be instrumental as we scale globally. After years in academic and industrial robotics, I saw every team - from research labs to warehouse automation startups - rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch. Our mission is to eliminate that duplication and democratize access to high-performance robot learning tools. With this funding and our free academic program, we’re enabling both researchers and companies to focus on advancing robotics itself, not on building the pipelines to support it.”
Laura Waldenstrom, Principal at Earlybird Venture Capital, added: “The robotics industry is at an inflection point, moving from the ROS 1.0 era to a data-first paradigm powered by deep learning. Teams are still wasting months building and maintaining their own infrastructure instead of focusing on deployment. Neuracore provides what AWS did for web applications: a reliable, scalable platform that just works. We’re thrilled to support Stephen’s vision to become the infrastructure layer for the coming wave of intelligent robotics.” By 2030, the AI-powered robotics sector is projected to exceed $50 billion, driven by advances in deep learning and real-world robot deployment. Yet most robotics teams remain limited by infrastructure constraints, often spending months integrating disparate systems for data logging, training, and deployment. Neuracore’s platform solves this by providing purpose-built infrastructure optimized for robotics workflows - from asynchronous data streaming and ML-native storage to one-click deployment and continuous improvement loops.
With its new academic program, Neuracore aims to close the accessibility gap between research and industry. Universities and robotics labs will now have free, unlimited access to the full platform, enabling faster experimentation, collaboration, and reproducibility across institutions.
“Academic researchers are building the foundation for tomorrow’s robots,” James added. “They shouldn’t waste months setting up data pipelines - they should be innovating. We want Neuracore to be the backbone that lets them do that.”