SafeWorld leaves stealth with $12.2M seed to stress-test robots around people in simulation

SafeWorld said in early October that it emerged from stealth with $12.2 million in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun, with Box Group, the Carnegie Mellon University endowment, Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel taking part, CEO Kyle Wong and co-founder Ding Zhao, director of CMU's Safe AI Lab, told The Robot Report.

Teams build safety scenarios in a browser from past incidents, standards and robot logs, and the software runs a robot through thousands of variations with reactive simulated humans, then repeats the tests after each software update.

Wong said SafeWorld works with about half a dozen companies, two-thirds of them publicly listed, across industrial, logistics, construction and some home uses. The round adds an independent testing layer to the safety tooling MEKAWIRE tracked on Sep 28, when NVIDIA opened its agent safety platform to robot makers including Figure and Skild AI.