# Fundamental Research Labs

> Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is a San Francisco applied AI research company building autonomous, socially intelligent agents - what it calls 'digital human beings.' Founded by former MIT computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang, the company ships consumer and prosumer products including Shortcut (a superhuman Excel agent) and Fairies (a general-purpose AI assistant), and raised a $33M Series A in August 2025 led by Prosus Ventures.

- **Founded:** 2023
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Dr. Robert Yang (Founder & CEO)
- **Team size:** ~35
- **Products:** Shortcut, Fairies, Research platform
- **Notable:** Closed $33M Series A led by Prosus in August 2025, Shortcut scored 80%+ on Microsoft Excel World Championship cases at ~10x human speed, Beat first-year analysts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in 89% of blind tests judged by managers from those firms

## Products & services

- **Shortcut** — A superhuman Excel agent that converts natural-language prompts into full financial models, simulations, and analyses - reportedly scoring 80%+ on Excel World Championship cases at roughly 10x human speed.
- **Fairies** — A general-purpose consumer AI assistant that chats, connects to your apps, queries across knowledge bases, and takes actions like scheduling.
- **Research platform** — Internal multi-agent and agentic-reasoning research platform used across the company's prosumer, games, and core research teams.

## Achievements

- Closed $33M Series A led by Prosus in August 2025
- Shortcut scored 80%+ on Microsoft Excel World Championship cases at ~10x human speed
- Beat first-year analysts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in 89% of blind tests judged by managers from those firms
- Recruited researchers from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP Group, Google X, and Citadel
- Backed by Eric Schmidt and Patrick Collison as angels

## Latest updates

- **2025-08** — Announced $33M Series A led by Prosus Ventures with participation from Patrick Collison and a16z Speedrun.
- **2025-07** — Launched Shortcut publicly; the Excel agent went viral on LinkedIn and X.
- **2024** — Closed $9M seed round and rebranded from Altera to Fundamental Research Labs.

## Links

- Website: https://fundamentalresearchlabs.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shortcutai
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/Fundamental

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/fundamental-research-labs
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-29