Iván Hernández Dalas: Parallax Worlds raises funding for hyper-realistic digital twins to test robots
Parallax Worlds co-founders Aumkar Renavikar (left) and Tanmay Agarwal (right). | Credit: Pear VC
Not only can digital twins and simulation be used to design robots, but they can also be used to stress test them. Parallax Worlds last week raised $4 million in seed funding. The company plans to use the financing for research and development, staffing, and to bring its product to market.
“The core response [for the product] that we’ve seen is from the segment of AI-based robots,” Tanmay Agarwal, co-founder of Parallax Worlds, said in a recent episode of The Robot Report Podcast. “So it can be these metal sanding, grinding, welding, pick-and-place robots that are now being deployed into these factories.”
“The common theme to all of these applications is that the robot has a camera. And it’s using the camera to detect where the part is, [and what] it’s going to be working on,” he explained. “So, for the end users of these factories, what that basically means is that it could potentially be programmed faster.”
The company‘s founding team has experience in both advanced robotics and industrial automation. Agarwal was trained in Stanford University’s robotics community under Prof. Fei-Fei Li and Prof. Jiajun Wu. He has developed software for systems ranging from home robots to self-driving vehicles.
Aumkar Renavikar, co-founder and chief technology officer, studied robotics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and supported factory-floor automation initiatives at BMW and Michelin. San Francisco-based Parallax Worlds was a contestant in the 2024 Pitchfire startup competition at RoboBusiness.
Digital twins enable developers to confirm performance
Factories and warehouses are adopting robots to achieve reshoring goals and address labor shortages. However, the transition from a pilot program to full production is slow, costly, and involves risk. Even basic automation projects can require a year and significant on-site testing to meet the uptime and reliability needed for production lines.
Parallax Worlds said it addresses this challenge by enabling robotics builders and operators to thoroughly test, measure, and confirm performance using a high-fidelity digital twin before deploying any physical equipment.
“Factories can’t afford robots to fail even for seconds; they need reliable performance and defensible ROI [return on investment],” said Agarwal. “Parallax Worlds gives builders and operators a way to measure reliability upfront, compress on-site iteration, and move from pilot to production faster.”
The company said its vertically integrated platform can turn simple video capture such as from an iPhone walkthrough into an accurate, interactive 3D environment. Robot development teams can generate fully navigable digital twins from a video and run interactive simulations using real robot software.
Parallax Worlds said its software integrates with industry physics engines and tooling, including NVIDIA Omniverse, Unreal, and Unity. It can add missing layers, including fast video-to-3D, robotics-specific behaviors, and AI-assisted scenario generation, noted the company.
Investors seek to build trust in automation
Parallax Worlds said its seed round brings its total funding to date to $4.9 million. announced a $4 million seed round, bringing total pre-seed and seed funding to $4.9 million. Pear VC led the round, with participation from GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, and Lightscape Partners, as well as angels and groups including Gaingels, Nova Threshold, and Mana Ventures.
Prior backers include Conviction (Embed), Unusual Ventures, and Spacecadet Ventures, as well as Boost VC.
“Parallax is building the missing simulation layer that bridges robotics R&D and real-world deployment by virtualizing physical spaces to make testing and reliability scalable,” said Payam Banazadeh, visiting partner at Pear VC. “Their digital-twin platform turns simulation into a true reliability engine, transforming what used to take years of costly trial and error into weeks of virtual iteration. It’s the kind of foundational shift that will redefine how entire industries build and trust automation.”
Parallax Worlds plans for expansion
Reshoring U.S. production demands more automation, but only the largest manufacturers can shoulder the cost and time of traditional deployment cycles. By shifting reliability testing into a realistic virtual environment, Parallax Worlds said it aims to democratize access to robotics, enabling more factories and warehouses to adopt automation with confidence.
Parallax Worlds has signed five robotics companies across manufacturing, construction, and select consumer-service use cases. They include Orangewood Labs for industrial automation, BotBuilt for home construction robots, and Rainier Labs for mobile welding robots.
“Parallax lets us validate robot behavior against real factory conditions using our actual control software,” said Abhinav Das, CEO of Orangewood Labs. “Being able to iterate on perception, planning, and edge-case handling before hardware is deployed materially accelerates our development cycle.”
“A lot of the [seed] round is going into hiring,” Tanmay told The Robot Report. “So right now, I’m hiring for a robotics role and a cloud infrastructure role. We’re looking for amazing people to join the team.”
“On the go-to market side, over the next one and two years, we want to expand into manufacturing as well,” he said. “We want to help manufacturers and logistics providers to bring these AI-based systems in a fast, low-cost way.”
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