Fundamental Research Labs Bags $33m in Prosus-led Series A - InforCapital

Prosus Ventures has spearheaded a $33 million Series A funding round for Fundamental Research Labs, previously known as Altera.AL. This AI-focused company aims to develop autonomous, collaborative AI agents for long-term tasks. Investors in this round included a16z Speedrun, Patron, First Spark, Factorial, VamosVentures, and angel investors such as Patrick Collison. The funding will bolster the company's research and team expansion, reinforcing its position as a leader in agent-first products.

Fundamental Research Labs, co-founded and led by Dr. Robert Yang, an AI researcher and computational neuroscientist who formerly taught at MIT, is transforming how humans interact with artificial intelligence. The company develops autonomous agents capable of operating and collaborating across complex, long-term tasks. The company's early research focused on training AI agents in collaborative gaming environments such as Minecraft and Roblox, where millions of users interacted with these agents.

This research evolved into Project Sid, the world's first agent civilization, featuring 1,000 autonomous agents working together for hours to complete tasks more effectively than they could individually. By the end of 2024, Fundamental had transitioned its agents from gaming environments to general computers. The company's performance on the OSWorld benchmark reached 48.45%, almost double the performance of other leading labs at that time.

Today, the company's focus is on advancing multi-agent systems and bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world products. In 2025, the company launched Fairies, a general-purpose AI agent that automates everyday tasks on users' desktops. The team also launched Shortcut, the first Superhuman Excel agent, which solves championship-level cases in under 10 minutes with over 80% accuracy, 10 times faster than humans.

“We’re excited to back Fundamental Research Labs in its mission to bring AI agents out of the sandbox and into the real world,” said Sandeep Bakshi, Investment Partner at Prosus Ventures. “We're thrilled to be part of the journey and support Robert, Nico, Shuying, and the whole team.”

This funding round follows a $9 million seed round in May 2024, co-led by First Spark Ventures and Patron, with participation from a16z SPEEDRUN, bringing the company's total funding to over $40 million.

The company is developing digital humans—machines that can learn, care, and grow alongside humans. The company's team includes computational neuroscientists, AI researchers, engineers, and builders from MIT EECS, the Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, and other leading institutions. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.