This startup that creates other startups just secured $100M to go all-in on physical AI
Vantora, formerly UP.Labs, raised $100M from Silversmith Capital Partners to build physical AI startups for corporate partners like Porsche, Alaska Airlines, and J.B. Hunt. The company is pivoting to a proprietary M&A model where partners can absorb startups in-house instead of taking them to market, unlocking sensitive, high-value AI problems in capital-heavy industries.
Four years after launching as UP.Labs, the startup-building firm has rebranded as Vantora and secured its first outside investment: $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners. The company, which sits somewhere between an incubator, accelerator, and venture firm, builds startups aimed at solving operational problems for major corporate customers like Alaska Airlines and Porsche. The new capital and name come alongside a strategic pivot — one that could reshape how large enterprises acquire AI capabilities.
A Shift Toward a Proprietary M&A Pipeline
Founder and CEO John Kuolt told TechCrunch that Vantora is moving toward a "proprietary M&A pipeline." The company will continue creating startups for its corporate partners, which invest in those ventures and become their first customers. The key change: those partners can now choose to absorb the startups directly into their core businesses and keep them entirely in-house, rather than taking them to the open market.
Under the previous model, Vantora regularly abandoned promising concepts because they were strategically vital to a partner yet too sensitive to commercialize externally.
"We were missing on the biggest value problems, which had the biggest upside because of that," Kuolt said in a recent interview. "Imagine you're a Fortune 100 industrial company and you need to retrofit all of your hardware and machines for autonomy. You need to own that, it needs to be sovereign, and you can't rely on a third party to go do that for you. You need to own that intelligence layer. They're never going to let us go sell that to their competitors."
The Push Into Physical AI
The ownership-driven model has sharpened Vantora's focus on physical AI startups, Kuolt said, because it unlocks use cases that previously fell through the cracks. He pointed to a concept the firm developed for logistics partner J.B. Hunt as an example. "They said there is no way you can take this out to the world, and so we passed on it," he recalled — a project the new proprietary structure now makes viable.
Vantora's current customer roster includes existing partners as well as new names in industrial manufacturing and the oil and gas sector, which the company declined to identify.
How Vantora Differs From a Traditional VC
The firm launched in 2022 with Porsche as its founding corporate partner and has since spun up several startups for the automaker, along with deals involving Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash, and TDG, the parent company of Ashley Furniture. In its early days, UP.Labs maintained a relationship with venture firm Up.Partners — though never a financial one. Vantora still shares office space with the California-based VC but operates as an independent entity, and the $100 million from Silversmith marks its first external funding.
What to watch next: whether the proprietary model proves out at scale, and how many more enterprises in capital-heavy industries choose to own, rather than buy, their AI infrastructure.