Palo Alto AI research lab, NeoCognition, has received $40 million in seed funding from Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners. The startup, spun out of Ohio State University by Yu Su, argues that current AI agents complete tasks as intended only half the time, a problem that leads to a reliability gap. The company aims to give agents a mechanism for rapid specialisation through experience rather than general training. The funding is co-led by Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, and Ion Stoica, co-founder and executive chairman of Databricks, and AI researchers Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. The commercial strategy is primarily enterprise focused on established SaaS companies rather than consumer end-users.