HIVE, a Physical AI startup from Kristiansand, has secured $15 million in pre-Series A funding led by SuperSeed.

The company’s technology is already being used in tunnels, quarries, and logistics locations. Proof of the effectiveness of physical AI in industrial settings should come this year.

HIVE has 52 employees and is expanding from Europe into the US. The company has not disclosed its total funding to date.

Christoffer Jørgenvåg started out developing control systems and later sold the company that built them. From that, he realised it would be better to create a single intelligence to run all the machines, rather than making each machine smarter on its own.

This idea led him to start HIVE, the Kristiansand-based company that just closed a $15 million pre-Series A round.

SuperSeed, a London-based firm focused on Physical AI, led the funding round. Tech Funding News reported in March that SuperSeed’s Fund III, backed by a £50 million cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank, counts HIVE among its lead investments alongside Ai Build and All3.

Veriten, Skyfall, and Nysnø also joined, along with angel investors Børge Hald, co-founder of Medallia, and Jørn Lyseggen, founder of Meltwater.

Where the machines are actually being used

Founded in 2020, HIVE builds a silicon brain, which can be explained as neural networks trained to act like human operators, which are installed on existing forklifts, wheel loaders, and excavators rather than sold as new hardware.

“It is not automation, it is trainable AI. When you operate the systems over time, they get smarter,” Jørgenvåg explains to Tech Funding News.

This is similar to companies like Cyngn in California and Fernride in Munich, which also retrofit existing fleets rather than sell new machines. Jørgenvåg says most competitors focus on a single machine type, whereas HIVE’s system works across any brand or machine type.

“HIVE’s silicon brain is powerful enough to retrofit existing industrial fleets, and the intelligence compounds in value with every hour it runs. That is the defining wave of physical AI for the next decade,” says Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at Superseed.

HIVE’s technology has delivered real results for customers, including a wheel loader at Yara’s Herøya plant, a Norwegian Road Authority avalanche-clearance project, an unnamed logistics operator, and a previous partnership with Toyota Material Handling.

A fundraising round without urgency

This is Jørgenvåg’s first time raising venture capital, even though he previously built and sold a company. He spent a few months in Silicon Valley before this round talking with founders and investors to learn about financing, and turned down capital that didn’t fit HIVE’s mission.

For comparison, Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs, a frontier AI lab also working on real-world sensor data and physical systems, raised $1.03 billion in a seed round in March, roughly 70 times the size of HIVE’s pre-Series A. When we asked about the scale of physical AI funding generally, Jørgenvåg pointed to the sector’s large untapped potential rather than addressing the comparison directly.

Mordor Intelligence reports that the industrial automation market was valued at about $238 billion in 2026 and is expected to grow at 7.55% annually through 2031. This growth is primarily driven by labour shortages and the need to upgrade existing equipment, both of which align with the market gap HIVE aims to fill.

HIVE has 52 employees and plans to use the new funding to hire more tech staff and expand into the US. The company has not disclosed its total funding to date.

The real test for physical AI, on Jørgenvåg’s own timeline, comes in the second half of 2026, with cost savings and efficiency gains expected next year rather than this one. Whether HIVE’s silicon brain gets there before the funding runs out, or joins other physical AI companies still looking for proof from real customer data, remains an open question.