Introducing SafeWorld: An AI Lab Building Systems to Improve Robot Safety for the Next Billion Machines

SafeWorld, an AI lab building robot safety simulation technologies, today emerged from stealth with $12.2M in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun, along with Box Group, Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and other leading VCs & angel investors. SafeWorld’s platform provides safety testing and simulation software to help enterprises evaluate and deploy robots safely and responsibly.

Robots’ Safety Problem: As Autonomy Scales, Safety Must Scale With It
Until now, AI safety has mostly been a software conversation. But when AI controls a robot, failures can have physical consequences. Over the coming decades, billions of AI-powered robots will be deployed alongside people. Unlike the deterministic, hard-coded robots of the past, physical AI requires orders of magnitude more safety testing and edge-case simulation. Today’s testing status quo relies on prohibitively slow and expensive physical tests that are unable to scale to a massive number of edge cases. Forced to manage this uncertainty, deployers resort to physical cages and speed limits, throttling robot productivity and human collaboration. If autonomy is going to scale to billions of machines, safety validation must scale with it.

“Safety has been foundational to Anyware Robotics from day one,” said Thomas Tang, CEO of Anyware Robotics. “Advanced simulation tools like SafeWorld give us a scalable way to test challenging scenarios, strengthen our safety processes, and better prepare our robots for real-world deployment.”

SafeWorld’s Solution: Robot safety simulation to help enterprises deploy AI in the physical world
More capable robots require more capable ways to test them. SafeWorld gives enterprises a scalable way to test how robots behave around people in rare, dangerous, and unexpected situations, without putting anyone at risk. Teams can build scenarios right in the browser from past incidents, safety standards, and robot logs, with no simulation expertise required. SafeWorld then runs the robot through thousands of variations with realistic, reactive human motion and measures safety performance. Because every software update and new environment can introduce new risks, teams can rerun these tests continuously, not just once before launch. The result is a safety record that engineering, safety, and operations leaders can stand behind.

“As more of the physical world becomes automated, safety needs to become a continuous, intelligent layer that evolves alongside the machines themselves,” said Alex Hartz, General Partner at Shine Capital. “SafeWorld has the rare combination of deep technical expertise in AI and robotics safety, along with the ambition to build the independent safety infrastructure for the physical AI era.”

“AI’s impact is going far beyond software and beginning to have profound impact across hardware/robotics in the physical world,” said Jon Lai, General Partner at a16z speedrun. “The SafeWorld team has combined world-class research in safe AI with exceptional commercial execution. By transforming safety testing from manual field trials into automated, high-fidelity simulations, SafeWorld is building the essential trust layer required to deploy the next generation of autonomous machines.”

SafeWorld’s Team: Pairing Decades of Academic & Operational Excellence
SafeWorld was co-founded by a team of researchers and entrepreneurs including:

• Dr. Ding Zhao: Director of the Safe AI Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, former researcher at Google DeepMind, and National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient, with over 17 years dedicated to safe autonomous systems.
• Kyle Wong: Veteran founder who previously founded Pixlee, a leading AI and UGC platform, used by 1,000+ brands, which he led from inception through acquisition. Most recently, he served as CEO of StartX, Stanford’s startup accelerator.
• Simo Rachidi: Repeat founder and former Principal Security & ML Engineer at Salesforce Einstein, where he architected enterprise-scale data pipelines and ML systems handling petabytes of data daily. Prior to Salesforce, Rachidi founded several startups across ML & consumer.

“For nearly two decades, I’ve worked on making autonomous systems safer,” said Dr. Ding Zhao. “One of the biggest lessons from autonomous vehicles is that real-world testing alone can’t cover every dangerous situation. As robots move into factories, warehouses, and other human environments, simulation gives us a way to test those situations before they happen in the real world. The same rigor the AI community is bringing to models now needs to apply to the machines those models control.”

“As robotics moves from impressive demos to everyday deployment, safety becomes a prerequisite for adoption.” said Kyle Wong, co-founder and CEO of SafeWorld. “We believe more modern ways to test and validate safety can help unlock the broader potential of robotics.”

SafeWorld is actively running early pilots with major automotive OEMs, warehouse automation leaders, and medical device manufacturers. Along with the investors listed above, SafeWorld’s oversubscribed round included Ovo Fund, Valkyrie, Zelda Ventures, Alpha Square Group, Founders Future, Brave Capital along with founders and executives from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, DoorDash, Generalist, Dyna, Recursive, Together AI, and Salesforce.

Learn more about SafeWorld and request access to the platform at https://www.safeworld.ai/.

About SafeWorld
SafeWorld’s mission is to make autonomy safe around people. The company provides safety testing and simulation software that helps enterprises evaluate and deploy robots safely and responsibly. Built by leading AI researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Salesforce AI Lab, SafeWorld provides automated, generative 3D simulation tools that enable hardware makers and deployers to validate AI-driven machines safely, rapidly, and at scale. By combining natural-language scenario generation with reactive human trajectory models, SafeWorld allows companies to run millions of edge-case simulations. SafeWorld is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. To learn more, visit https://www.safeworld.ai/.

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