Altera raises $9m in seed round to fund AI software
The company recently built an AI agent that can play Minecraft without human input
AI startup Altera has raised $9 million in a seed round, co-led by Patron and First Spark Ventures.
Founded in December 2023, this brings its total funding to $11.1 million following a previous pre-seed round in January.
The company intends to use these funds to improve its artificial intelligence software, and to grow its team for future development.
Other investors for this round included A16Z Speedrun, Vamos Ventures, and Alumni Ventures, as well as veteran investor Mitch Lasky, co-founder of Valorant Stephen Lim, Supercell executive board member Greg Harper, Duolingo CBO Bob Meese, and Vertex Pharma co-founder Rich Aldrich.
As reported by GamesBeat, Altera recently created an AI agent to play Minecraft with other players. The bot achieved the diamond pickaxe achievement in game without any human input.
"Minecraft allows us to really build agents that are sophisticated in the actions they can take," co-founder and CEO of Altera Robert Yang said.
"We mean to give machines the fundamental qualities that pretty much all humans share but are missing in current machines, like empathy."
Brian Cho, co-founder and general partner at Patron, added: "As an investor, it's not often you come across a startup demo that fundamentally shifts your perspective on human-computer interaction.
"The talented team at Altera has developed extraordinary AI agent tech that has the potential to go beyond its gaming origins and impact numerous industries."
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