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Metacognition founders Paul Dalby, Anton van den Hengel and Stephen Gould. Credit: Metacognition.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPublished on\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 28, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Airtree has pumped $5 million into Adelaide\u2019s Metacognition, bringing the AI startup\u2019s pre-seed round to a huge $15 million.<\/p>\n
Metacognition founders Paul Dalby, Anton van den Hengel and Stephen Gould. Credit: Metacognition.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month Adelaide\u2019s Metacognition released an open-source AI for robotic navigation that beat models from Chinese giant Alibaba and France\u2019s Mistral in simulated tests. It is proof, co-founder Anton van den Hengel says, that Australia can be more than a home for data centres<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cWe can do foundational AI in Australia, we can turn cutting-edge AI into economic value in Australia,\u201d van den Hengel said. \u201cAre we just a real estate transaction on the side of somebody else\u2019s growth, or are we actually going to participate in the core of that process? My vote is strongly for the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n Airtree, one of Australia\u2019s biggest venture capital firms, is casting its vote in that direction too. It has invested $5 million into Metacognition, bringing the AI lab\u2019s pre-seed funding to $15 million after an initial $10 million from Main Sequence<\/a>. <\/p>\n In absolute terms, there is little notable about an AI startup raising $15 million. But that number is astronomical for a pre-seed round \u2013 which is almost as early as \u201cearly-stage\u201d investing gets. It is nearly 10-times the 2026 median of $1.6 million<\/a>, and van den Hengel calls it \u201cwalking around money\u201d compared to what the startup will soon need. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hiring 20 people, and 90 per cent of them have PhDs, but if we\u2019re going to get to the point where we\u2019ve got 100 people, which is what you really need to be able to compete, then we\u2019re going to have to raise a lot more.\u201d<\/p>\n Metacognition earlier this month released NavGPT-3, an open-source vision-language model it says allows robots to interpret verbal commands and navigate environments. It combines two types of AI \u2013 reasoning and navigation \u2013 to achieve that. Benchmarking tests showed the AI enabled more reliable navigation than competing tech from $360 billion tech giant Alibaba and France\u2019s $24 billion Mistral startup. <\/p>\n Its strongest results were achieved by integrating frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic to provide the reasoning, but even its model on its own scored higher than the competition.<\/p>\n Metacognition\u2019s animating premise is that robots will be a growing presence in homes and industry in the coming years \u2013 but only if people and businesses can trust them. It is bad when ChatGPT hallucinates misinformation, but the stakes are fundamentally higher for robots that can wreak havoc in the physical world. <\/p>\n Metacognition is seeking to develop the \u201coperating system\u201d for robots \u2013 the AI layer that lets robots understand commands and erects guardrails designed to stop unsafe or counterproductive actions. Just like computer makers flock to Microsoft\u2019s Windows, Metacognition\u2019s ambition is to provide software for robotics manufacturers around the globe.<\/p>\n \u201cIf all we do is keep the lights on for models trained elsewhere, the value walks out the door with the tenants,\u201d says Airtree co-founder Craig Blair. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to win everything, but we do need to be in the game, which means backing the people building the missing pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed?\u00a0Tap here to make Forbes Australia a preferred source on Google.<\/a><\/p>\n Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world.\u00a0Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0become a member here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on October 28, 2026 Airtree has pumped $5 million into Adelaide\u2019s Metacognition, bringing the AI startup\u2019s pre-seed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":944625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,247526,254,255,64,63,99,5476,300,201,105,1485,5571],"class_list":["post-944624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-airtree","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-investing","tag-robotics","tag-startup","tag-technology","tag-venture-capital","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/944625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}