A former Meta AI research director has raised $10.25 million for a Seattle-area startup working on what it calls “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.
A company called Noosphere Labs, led by Kevin Carlberg, disclosed the financing in a Form D filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reached via phone by GeekWire on Monday evening, Carlberg said he wasn’t yet ready to share details about the startup.
Trilogy Equity Partners confirmed that it led the round. One of the directors listed in the Form D filing is Amy McCullough, a managing director at the Bellevue-based venture firm. Madrona, the Seattle VC firm, separately confirmed that it had “major participation” in the round.
Carlberg’s personal website describes him as founder and CEO of a “stealth AI startup focused on physical AI and real-world intelligence.” The company’s website says, “Human-centered physical intelligence. Built for the world we inhabit,” with a “Coming Soon” title.
The website styles the name Noösphere, with two dots over the second “o” signaling that it’s pronounced as a separate syllable: NOH-uh-sfeer. The term dates to the 1920s, describing a sphere of human thought wrapped around the planet the way the biosphere wraps it in life.
Carlberg spent more than five years at Meta, where he led a research team spanning Reality Labs Research and the company’s Fundamental AI Research group, working on physical AI and simulation for wearable computers and virtual and mixed-reality devices.
Before that, he spent eight years at Sandia National Laboratories developing methods to make massive physics simulations run in near-real time for national security applications. He holds a doctorate from Stanford and is an affiliate associate professor of applied mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.
Although Carlberg hasn’t publicly detailed what the new startup is building, his research points to the problems he’s been focused on.
In a paper for the NeurIPS conference last year, for example, he and his Meta colleagues built a benchmark for “assistive wearable agents” — smart glasses and similar devices that figure out what a person is trying to do from video, audio and other signals, without being asked.
Noting how little prior work existed, they assembled a dataset from 348 participants to test it. The best AI models produced a relevant answer only 55% of the time, they found. The researchers concluded that current models “remain far from practical usefulness” at the task.
Also listed as a director in the startup’s filing is Tyler Simpson, a Seattle-area software executive who co-founded commute-management startup Luum, spent 11 years at Microsoft, and was most recently a director and technical program manager at Meta, overlapping with Carlberg.
Carlberg left Meta at the end of 2024 and announced on his website that he was taking a sabbatical. He incorporated Noosphere Labs early this year.
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