On a Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco, an analyst opens a blank Excel workbook. She types one sentence. Forty seconds later, the workbook contains a discounted cash flow model, sensitivity tables, and a sources tab. She did not write a single formula. The thing that did is called Shortcut, and it is the most visible product of a 35-person studio called Fundamental Research Labs.
The lab is small enough to fit in one room and ambitious enough to use a phrase that should embarrass it - "digital human beings" - without flinching. The team has decided that the next chapter of software is less about chat boxes and more about agents: programs that can plan, act, and keep going after you close the laptop.
Founder Robert Yang spent his earlier career as a computational neuroscientist on the MIT faculty, which is a useful clue. His lab is not chasing the biggest model. It is chasing the most useful one - the one that can carry a long task across hours, tools, and people without losing the plot. The bet is that "socially intelligent" agents are not a feature; they are the product.
We are building digital human beings - autonomous, collaborative, and socially intelligent agents.- Fundamental Research Labs, company brief
There is a games team. There is a prosumer apps team. There is a core research team and a platform team. From the outside it looks like a media company crossed with a research institute. That is roughly the idea. Products are not just things to sell. They are instruments. Each one is a way to measure what an agent can actually do in the wild.
Shortcut, the Excel agent, is the loudest instrument so far. When Fundamental ran a blind study, managers from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs preferred Shortcut's work to first-year analysts from their own firms in 89% of comparisons. On Excel World Championship cases - the closest thing the spreadsheet world has to a varsity sport - it scored over 80% and finished in roughly one-tenth the time. The video clips of one-prompt DCF models went viral on LinkedIn the way recipes used to go viral on Pinterest.
Then there is Fairies, the general-purpose consumer assistant. The pitch is older than the iPhone: an assistant that knows your apps, answers across them, schedules things, takes action. The graveyard of attempts is wide. Fundamental's argument is that the model layer has finally caught up to the dream, and that the missing ingredient was never raw intelligence but social context - the ability to behave like a person who has met you before.
In August 2025 the lab announced a $33 million Series A led by Prosus Ventures, with Patrick Collison participating. That brought total funding to roughly $45.1 million. Earlier checks came from a16z Speedrun, Patron, First Spark Ventures, Factorial, VamosVentures, and Eric Schmidt. The investor list is short, opinionated, and tells you something: this is being treated as a research bet that happens to ship.
Productivity apps are where the most value is being created today - but eventually we want to solve physical problems.- Dr. Robert Yang, founder
Yang has been candid about the longer arc. Productivity is the entry point because it pays now. The destination is embodiment - agents that work alongside people in the physical world. That is the part that makes you understand why a games team exists alongside an Excel team.
The lab used to be known as Altera. The old domain, altera.al, still serves as a leftover email. The rename to Fundamental Research Labs was not cosmetic. It announced a shift away from one product and toward a portfolio - and toward the more uncomfortable claim that what they are building is, in some way, human-shaped.
Whether or not you buy the framing, the products are doing the talking. The lab is charging users for Shortcut after a seven-day trial and is reportedly already revenue-generating. Fairies is in the wild. The hiring page is busy. And the analyst at the start of this story is now on her sixth model of the day.