Investors are aggressively courting AI researchers to build startups that can make AI more reliable and efficient.

Yu Su, an Ohio State professor leading an AI agent lab, said he initially resisted the pressure from VCs to commercialize his work. He finally took the leap last year and spun out his work into a startup when he saw that foundational model advances could make agents truly personalized.

NeoCognition, a startup Su describes as a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, has just emerged from stealth with $40 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners and angels, including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.

“Today’s agents are generalists,” Su (pictured left) told TechCrunch. “Every time you ask them to do a task, you take a leap of faith.”

According to Su, the issue lies in a lack of consistency. Current agents, whether from Claude Code, OpenClaw or Perplexity’s computer tools, successfully complete tasks as intended only about 50% of the time, he said.

Since agents are still so unreliable, they are not ready to be trusted, independent workers, Su told TechCrunch. NeoCognition intends to change that by developing an agent system that can self-learn to become an expert in any domain, similar to how humans learn.

Su argues that while human intelligence is broad, its real power is our ability to specialize. When we enter a new environment or profession, we can rapidly master its unique rules, relationships, and consequences.

NeoCognition is building agents to mirror this exact approach.

“For humans, our continued learning process is essentially the process of building a world model for any profession, any environment,” Su said. “We believe for agents to become experts, they need to learn autonomously to build a model of any given micro world.”

Su views this capacity for rapid specialization as the critical missing link to getting AI to work reliably on its own.

While it is possible to train agents for autonomous tasks, they must be custom-engineered for a specific vertical. NeoCognition is different because it’s building agents that are generalists capable of self-learning and specializing in any domain.

NeoCognition intends to sell its agent systems primarily to enterprises, including established SaaS companies, which can use them to build agent-workers or to enhance existing product offerings.

Su highlighted that an investment from Vista Equity Partners is especially valuable for this reason. As one of the largest private equity firms in the software space, Vista can provide NeoCognition with direct access to a vast portfolio of companies looking to modernize their products with AI.

NeoCognition currently has about 15 employees, the majority of whom hold PhDs.

The AI platform Clarifai deleted 3 million photos that it says it got from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI, according to Reuters. The company also deleted any models that were trained using that data.

Per the FTC’s investigation, Clarifai asked OkCupid — whose executives had invested in the company — to share data in 2014. The dating app then provided these user-uploaded photos, reports say, along with other demographic and location data. Per OkCupid’s own privacy policies, this behavior should have been prohibited.

“We’re ⁠collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

Though this incident appears to have taken place twelve years ago, the FTC did not open an investigation until 2019, when a New York Times article about Clarifai mentioned that the company had used images from OkCupid to build an AI tool that could estimate someone’s age, sex, and race based on their face.

The FTC and OkCupid, which is owned by Match Group, settled the lawsuit last month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group did not admit to the allegations that it deceived users by violating its own privacy policies, but Clarifai’s confirmation that it has deleted the data implies that the company did indeed get access to those photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid deliberately concealed this behavior and attempted to obstruct its investigation.

OkCupid and Clarifai did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.

While the FTC is not able to fine companies for this type of first-time offense, the agency declared that OkCupid and Match are “permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting” the nature of their data collection and sharing. So, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from partaking in these behaviors, which are already not allowed by the FTC.