Neuracore lands £2.4m pre-seed to speed up how robots learn
This article covers Neuracore, a robotics startup that has raised £2.4m in pre-seed funding to simplify the infrastructure robotics teams use to collect data, train models and deploy AI systems. It aims to support developers in research labs and commercial robotics teams across healthcare, industrial automation, agriculture, warehousing and service robotics by providing a cloud-native platform to replace fragmented data pipelines and speed model deployment.
Neuracore, a robotics startup founded in 2024 in London, has raised £2.4 million in pre-seed funding to simplify the infrastructure that robotics teams use to collect data, train models and deploy AI systems. The company says its cloud-native platform replaces fragmented, manually assembled pipelines, aiming to cut the time from robot data to deployed machine-learning models from months to days — a change that could affect developers in research labs and commercial robotics teams across healthcare, industrial automation, agriculture, warehousing and service robotics.
Why it matters
Robotics teams routinely spend a large share of engineering time building and maintaining bespoke data pipelines before they can experiment with learning algorithms. Neuracore’s pitch addresses that bottleneck by offering an integrated cloud environment for data ingestion, storage, labelling, experimentation and model deployment. If the platform delivers on reduced integration work, it could lower the barrier to deploying robot learning in production and speed up iteration across multiple sectors.
Inside the product
Neuracore provides a unified stack intended to replace disconnected, home-grown setups that often combine multiple tools. The platform supports imitation learning, reinforcement learning and transfer learning, and it accommodates custom robot configurations. The company says more than 50 organisations already use the platform, spanning commercial robotics teams and academic research groups, and that it has partnerships with major hardware manufacturers to streamline real-world testing and deployment.
Neuracore positions itself against older robotics infrastructure providers such as Clearpath Robotics and Covariant, arguing its cloud-native architecture offers deeper integration for data-first robot learning workflows.
In the announcement, Stephen James, founder and Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, said:
In every robotics team I’ve worked with, people were rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch. Our mission is to remove that duplication and give both researchers and companies the tools they need to focus on real innovation, not on maintaining pipelines.
In the announcement, Stephen James, founder and Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, said:
Diversity drives our innovation. We bring together expertise from Imperial, UC Berkeley, NYU, Meta, Google, DeepMind and beyond. This blend of perspectives ensures we build solutions that are both cutting-edge and broadly impactful.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and included participation from Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, alongside other unnamed industry experts. Earlybird’s involvement signals interest from established European venture firms in infrastructure that supports data-driven robotics development.
In the announcement, Laura Waldenstrom, Principal at Earlybird Venture Capital, said:
The robotics industry is at an inflexion point, moving from the ROS 1.0 era to a data-first paradigm powered by deep learning. Teams are still wasting months building and maintaining their own infrastructure instead of focusing on deployment. Neuracore provides what AWS did for web applications: a reliable, scalable platform that just works.
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Founder perspective
James founded Neuracore after observing repetitive infrastructure work across teams and labs. The company plans to use the new funds to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development and grow both its open-source and commercial user communities. Neuracore also intends to scale a free academic programme to support research groups globally.
In the announcement, Stephen James, founder and Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, said:
We’re building a community around the platform. Our vision is for Neuracore to become the natural home for bleeding-edge robot learning algorithms, where engineers and researchers can collaborate and push the boundaries of what robots can do.
The bigger picture
The raise comes as robotics increasingly shifts toward data-centric approaches, with organisations wanting platforms that handle large-scale data collection and model lifecycle management. For UK and European robotics developers, cloud-native infrastructure can reduce duplicated effort and free teams to focus on application-level problems. Participation from figures such as Clem Delangue also highlights crossover interest from adjacent AI infrastructure players.
As the company grows, its ability to convert pilot users into long-term customers and to integrate with a wide range of hardware will be key. The outcome will matter not just for Neuracore but for the broader UK robotics ecosystem, where infrastructure choices influence how quickly research converts into commercial deployments and exports.
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