Rerun
Data & simulation
Open-source SDK plus commercial multimodal database for physical AI: log, visualise and query robot, drone and AV sensor data.
Rerun builds the data infrastructure for physical AI: an open-source SDK and viewer for logging and visualising multimodal robot data (images, depth, point clouds, transforms, time series) on one timeline, plus a commercial high-performance database built specifically for robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones and spatial computing. The pitch is that teams debugging a robot need to see the world through its sensors, and that existing tooling — rosbag files and ad-hoc scripts — is the bottleneck on iteration speed. The founding team includes the creator of the Rust egui GUI framework and the creator of the rosbag format, and Rerun's visualisations are used inside Meta's Project Aria and Hugging Face's LeRobot ecosystem. It raised a $17M seed in March 2025 led by Point Nine.
Research mapping
Physical AI / Sim-to-Real, Digital Twins & Validation (L9) / Data & simulation
Evidence boundary
Original analysis and independent corroboration remain under development. Commercial scale and durable technical advantage remain under review.
What makes it defensible
Rerun owns the open-source default for robot-data visualisation and converts that beachhead into a commercial multimodal database — becoming the format and query layer physical-AI teams standardise on.
Position in the stack: Data / validation tooling layer (L9 adjacent). Rerun sits between robot sensors and the model team: everything captured has to be logged, synchronised and queried before a policy can be debugged. The moat is developer habit plus format ownership — the SDK is already in Meta's and LeRobot's tooling, so the commercial database inherits a standard rather than having to win one.
Who buys it
Named customers: Meta, Google, Hugging Face (LeRobot), Unitree
Founding team
Nikolaus West — Co-founder & CEO — Stanford-trained computer vision engineer and second-time founder; previously built visualisation tooling for physical-AI products.
Emil Ernerfeldt — Co-founder & CTO — Creator of egui, the most widely used open-source GUI framework in Rust; joined from the gaming industry.
Moritz Schiebold — Co-founder & COO — Former CEO of 3D-scanning company Volumental; long-time colleague of West and Ernerfeldt.
SourceFinancing detail
- Last round
- Seed
Investors: Point Nine, Costanoa, Sunflower Capital, Seedcamp, Guillermo Rauch, Eric Jang, Oliver Cameron
Mapped funds and investors
Direct relationships supported by published evidence.
Reported holdings as-of
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Disclosed investment history
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Showing up to four relationships in each group. ETF weights describe the fund’s portfolio, not ownership of this company. Private investment history does not establish current ownership.