A startup that builds other startups raised $100M, and is all-in on physical AI

Vantora, the startup studio that began as UP.Labs four years ago, has secured $100 million in outside capital from Silversmith Capital Partners and rebranded while sharpening its customer focus. The firm originally built venture-stage companies to address problems for corporate customers and the broader market, counting Porsche, Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash and TDG (parent of Ashley Furniture) among its partners. Under the new strategy, Vantora will concentrate on creating startups exclusively for its corporate partners and enable those partners to fold the ventures into their own operations.

CEO John Kuolt described the new approach as a move toward a “proprietary M&A pipeline.” Under this model, corporate partners will invest in the ventures Vantora builds and act as their initial customers, with the option to keep the startups private and integrate them into their core businesses. Kuolt said that previously Vantora had to abandon ideas that were strategically important to corporate clients but too sensitive to commercialize; the new model aims to capture that value by keeping such inventions within the partner organizations.

The firm is placing particular emphasis on physical AI—applications that combine machine intelligence with hardware and on-site systems—because these use cases often require sovereignty and close control by large industrial customers. Kuolt gave an example of a startup concept developed for logistics partner J.B. Hunt that the company would not allow to be commercialized broadly; Vantora’s proprietary model now lets it pursue those kinds of projects. The shift is intended to address "big physical AI use cases" such as retrofitting industrial machinery for autonomy, where companies prefer to own the intelligence stack.

Vantora says it remains an independent entity, though it shares office space with Up.Partners, a venture firm it was affiliated with in its early days but never financially tied to. The $100 million from Silversmith is Vantora’s first external investment. The firm declined to name some of its new industrial and oil-and-gas customers but indicated it is working with additional partners in those sectors under the revised, partner-only commercialization model.