Kiwi Harry Mellsop raises $7.3m for his physical-world AI start-up Antioch

He then moved to New York, where he co-founded his start-up, Transpose, with fellow Stanford grad Alex Langshur.

Antioch helps teams build better robots by shifting development into simulation. Instead of relying on slow, hardware‑bound iteration, robotic systems are defined digitally, validated in parallel scenarios and deployed with confidence.

He described it as a “sort of blockchain intelligence company”.

Its tech was designed as a tool for authorities trying to track the flow of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the better to thwart the likes of “criminals or adversarial nation states using cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions”.

In May 2023, the pair sold Transpose – still only months old – to the market leader in its field, national security contractor Chainalysis, in a deal the Herald understands ran to eight figures.

Mellsop and Langshur stayed with Transpose until May this year, when he and Langshure co-founded Antioch with two more Stanford alumni: Colton Swingle and Collin Schlager.

Kiwis back raise

The US$4.3 million ($7.4m) “pre-seed round” was led by a US venture capital firm, A* Ventures with support from Auckland’s Icehouse Ventures and one of Mellsop’s fellow Kiwi expats working in AI, founder Adrian Macneil (who just last month raised US$40m for his own physical-world AI start-up, Foxglove).

US VCs Abstract, MaC Venture Capital (who also supported a Transponse) and Box Group also supported the round.

‘Absurdly manual’

“Right now, the way companies train AI for robots is absurdly manual,” Mellsop said.

“We’ve talked to teams literally renting Airbnbs just so they can test their household robots overnight, or spending millions building fake warehouses and neighbourhoods to simulate the real world. It’s slow, expensive and wildly inefficient. With Antioch, you can do all of that virtually.”

The pre-seed funds will be used for product development, as Antioch works with early customers. But the sort of hiring frenzy we saw in yesteryear – or even just two years ago – is not part of the agenda.

“We will bring on a few extras, but we can run a lot leaner than Transpose,” Mellsop said, thanks to new AI tools that help build software.

The biggest thing of the Next Big Things

This time, he and his co-founders have no plans for a trade sale, Mellsop said.

He said no one else is creating the kind of “wholesale” solution that Antioch offers.

Mellsop said large language models like ChatGPT have changed white-collar work forever.

“But someone still needs the things we use every day. We still need logistics. We still need agriculture. And AI is still not providing the same efficiency gains in the physical world.”

Mellsop said he saw Antioch helping to provide that boost.

“We think that we’re very early to the market with a solution that almost everybody is going to need in that space,” he said.

“We see this as a longer-term play. We believe that the physical AI industry is going to be the largest industry in the world of the next 10 years.”

‘Re-shoring’ manufacturing

Mellsop is also thinking big in terms of socio-political themes – and “re-shoring” manufacturing in an increasingly unstable world, in part using his young firm’s technology.

“In New Zealand and in the US, over the last 50 years, we’ve seen a lot of jobs moved overseas and a lot of industries that used to be the lifeblood of the economy moved overseas,” he said.

“In a less-certain macro geopolitical environment, bringing as much of that back home as possible is kind of critical from a national security perspective, but also as a social objective.”

The AI OE

Mellsop is one of a small army of Kiwi expats making it big in AI.

Beyond the aforementioned Macneil, the crew includes

Ben Goodger, who heads the team that created OpenAI’s Atlas web browser; The UK-based Alex Kendall, co-founder of self-driving car tech startup Wayve, backed by Microsoft, Nvidia and others; David Ferguson, co-founder of another self-drive startup, San Francisco’s Nuro, backed by Uber, Nvidia and others; Paul Copplestone, whose US-based start-up Supabase – whose technology helps with “vibe coding” recently raised US$200m; Ex-Bell Gully laywer Min-Kyu Jung, who recently reaised $28m for his San Francisco-based legal AI start-up;The Silicon Valley-based, Yang Fan Yun and Shine Wu, who recently raised $10m for their AI browser; And Nic Lane whose UK-based start-up Flower helps AI makers train their software.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.