Hey folks, Nuked here! Today, I’m excited to tell you about a fascinating leap in AI technology from Fundamental Research Labs. Buckle up!

This innovative company, previously known as Altera, just raised over $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus and with contributions from Stripe’s Patrick Collison. Their approach? Creating multiple AI applications across various sectors, rather than sticking to a single product line.

Founded by Dr. Robert Yang, a former MIT faculty member, the startup started by developing bots that could play Minecraft. Now, they have a diverse team working on different projects, including a gaming team, a prosumer app team, and an R&D platform team. Yang emphasizes their unique company structure aimed at being impactful in history, not just another typical startup.

One of their standout products is a general-purpose AI assistant called Fairies, which lets users chat, connect applications, and manage tasks like scheduling and automation, making life simpler and testing their tech in real-world scenarios.

Another cool tool is Shortcut, an agent resembling a junior analyst that works with spreadsheets to perform financial modeling and analysis autonomously. They’ve successfully deployed these tools in practice, with some revenue already rolling in after a trial period.

Sandeep Bakshi from Prosus praised the team’s focus on digital humans with practical use cases, highlighting their recent launches as significant demonstrations of AI’s potential to augment human work, not just prototypes.

Yang has big plans, including eventually building robots and tackling physical real-world problems, moving from productivity apps to embodiment and robotics. The company raised an initial seed round of $9 million last year, and collectively, they’ve amassed over $40 million in funding so far.

So, what’s next? Yang’s team is eager to keep innovating, with applications already generating revenue and evidence of AI’s increasing role in enhancing human capabilities—pretty awesome stuff!