world-models
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Robots in the Real World: Four CEOs on the Machina Stage
At the Machina conference in Paris, All-In host Jason Calacanis sits down with the leaders of four of the world's top robotics companies—ANYbotics, 1X, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics. Across four rapid-fire interviews, the CEOs explain why four-legged 'dog' robots conquered industrial inspection first, why humanoids are finally doing useful work, how teleoperation and internet-scale video data are training the next generation of machines, and where the real money and the real dangers lie—from explosive oil rigs to weaponized robots coming out of China. The through-line: robots are no longer research demos, they're deployed assets measured by ROI, and 'hard takeoff' where robots build robots may be as little as three years away.
Sureform
Sureform is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator X25) that collects real-world, multimodal human data to train robots and world models. It equips workers at hotels, warehouses, restaurants, construction sites, and laundromats with head-mounted cameras, stereo depth rigs, and handheld grippers that capture time-synced video, audio, pose, depth, and tactile data while they do their jobs. Each session is delivered to robotics teams as structured, synchronized, training-ready data.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Evidium
Evidium is a San Francisco healthcare-AI company building what it calls 'Referenced AI' - a neurosymbolic platform that turns medical evidence into computable knowledge. Rather than a black box, it projects patients across a computable map of clinical states and the transitions between them, so every insight traces back to guidelines, charts, and research. Founded and led by Carl Bate, the company sells transparent clinician-quality insights and probabilistic risk forecasts to health systems, insurers, and payviders, and closed a $22M Series A co-led by Health2047 (the AMA's venture studio) and WGG Partners in November 2025.
Tripo AI
Tripo AI, built by the startup VAST, is a generative-AI platform that turns text prompts and images into production-ready 3D models in seconds. Its Tripo Studio app and REST API cover the full 3D pipeline - generation, texturing, rigging, retopology, segmentation and stylization - and are used by more than 6.5 million creators and roughly 90,000 developers. Founded in 2023 by former MiniMax co-founder Simon Song, the company is pushing from single 3D assets toward interactive, persistent 'world models' and has raised close to $400 million from backers including Alibaba and Baidu Ventures.
Integral AI
Integral AI is a Japan-US startup building foundation world models - AI systems meant to learn, plan, and act in the real world the way people do, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and continuous, autonomous skill learning. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google AI leaders Jad Tarifi and Nima Asgharbeygi, the company positions its interactive world models as infrastructure for an AI-based economy, spanning robotics, universal simulators, and multimodal interfaces. In December 2025 it made headlines by claiming to have tested the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA.
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Jad Tarifi
Jad Tarifi is the co-founder, CEO and Chief AI Scientist of Integral AI, a Tokyo- and Silicon Valley-based startup building energy-efficient, interactive world models aimed at scalable artificial general intelligence and embodied robotics. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Google, where he founded and led the company's first generative AI team and worked on neocortex-inspired learning from limited data. Born and raised in Lebanon, he holds a PhD in computer science and AI from the University of Florida and an MS in quantum computing. In December 2025 he drew global attention - and skepticism - by claiming Integral AI had built the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA. He is also the author of the four-volume 'Freedom Series' on AI and human potential.
Decart
Decart is a frontier AI lab building real-time world models and the low-latency infrastructure that runs them. Its systems - Oasis, Lucy and the DOS optimization stack - generate and transform live video at millisecond latency, turning video games, livestreams and cameras into promptable, interactive worlds.
Amit Jain
Amit Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma AI, the Palo Alto-based AI company behind Dream Machine - a text-to-video platform with over 25 million users - and Ray 3, the world's first reasoning video model. Before founding Luma AI in 2021, he spent four years at Apple leading development of the Passthrough feature for Apple Vision Pro and integrating the first LiDAR sensors into iPhones. Under his leadership, Luma AI has raised over $1 billion in funding including a $900M Series C led by HUMAIN at a $4 billion valuation, and is building unified multimodal intelligence systems that blur the line between reasoning and reality synthesis.
Dean Leitersdorf
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.