Prosus invests $33M in Fundamental Research Labs for AI agent development
Prosus Ventures leads a $33M Series A funding round in Fundamental Research Labs to advance autonomous AI agent technology and digital human development.
01 Aug 2025 — Prosus Ventures has spearheaded a $33 million Series A investment in Fundamental Research Labs, an applied AI research company focused on developing autonomous, collaborative AI agents. The round included participation from a16z Speedrun, Patron, First Spark, and notable angels like Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. This brings the company’s total funding to over $40 million.
From Gaming to Real-World AI
Founded by Dr. Robert Yang (ex-MIT faculty) and a team of AI experts from MIT, Stanford, and Google X, Fundamental Research Labs initially trained its agents in environments like Minecraft and Roblox. Their breakthrough Project Sid demonstrated 1,000 agents collaborating to solve tasks more efficiently than individuals. By late 2024, their OSWorld benchmark performance reached 48.45%, doubling competitors’ results.
Bridging Research and Products
The company’s flagship product, Fairies, is a desktop-based AI agent automating everyday tasks. Their latest innovation, Shortcut, is a Superhuman Excel agent solving championship-level cases 10x faster than humans—outperforming analysts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in 89% of blind tests.
"Our mission is to deliver research breakthroughs that lead to impactful products," said Dr. Yang. "We’re learning from human collaboration to build digital humans."
Investor Confidence
Sandeep Bakshi of Prosus Ventures praised the team’s "unchained ambition," highlighting their neuroscience-driven approach to redefine human-machine interaction. The funding will accelerate research, team expansion, and product development.
Key Highlights:
- $9M seed round in May 2024 (led by First Spark Ventures and Patron).
- Shortcut launched publicly in July 2025 after a 20,000-person waitlist.
- Agents evolved from gaming to real-world problem-solving.
Tags: #ArtificialIntelligence #VentureCapital #TechInnovation
For more, visit Fundamental Research Labs or Prosus.
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David Chen
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Senior analyst focusing on AI startup ecosystem with 11 years of venture capital and startup analysis experience. Former member of Sequoia Capital AI investment team, now independent analyst writing AI startup and investment analysis articles for Forbes, Harvard Business Review and other publications.