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Vercept’s founding team includes, L-R, Matt Deitke, CEO Kiana Ehsani, Ross Girshick, and Luca Weihs. Not pictured: Oren Etzioni. (Vercept Photo)
A group of former Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) research leaders have formed a new Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup, Vercept. They say they’ve already raised funding, but they’re keeping their plans under wraps for now.
Vercept is led by CEO and co-founder Kiana Ehsani, who previously oversaw the Ai2 robotics and embodied artificial intelligence teams as a senior researcher.
Embodied AI focuses on intelligent agents that can interact with and learn from their environment, combining computer vision, machine learning, and robotics.
Oren Etzioni, who was the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI before stepping down in 2022, posted on LinkedIn last week that he has joined the startup as a co-founder. A longtime AI specialist and professor with the University of Washington Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, he most recently ran the nonprofit AI organization TrueMedia.org, which has ceased operations.
Others on the founding team are:
Matt Deitke, who led the development of Ai2 research projects including Molmo, ProcTHOR, and Objaverse.
Luca Weihs, previously Ai2 research manager and infrastructure team lead, working in areas including AI agents and reinforcement learning.
Ross Girshick, a pioneer in the combination of computer vision and deep learning, and a former research scientist at Meta AI and Ai2.
Vershani describes itself on its jobs page as “a stealth startup working on building out the next generation of AI applications.” Its home page indicates that it has already raised its seed round of funding.
The AI2 Incubator, which spun off from the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, is backing Vercept as the startup’s first institutional investor, according to the LinkedIn profile of Jacob Colker, an AI2 Incubator managing director.
A search for the startup in SEC Form D filings and PitchBook’s funding database didn’t turn up any further details. Washington state corporations records indicate that Vercept was formed in November.
