OpenMind has raised $20 million in a funding round led by Pantera Capital to advance its development of open-source intelligence infrastructure for robots. The financing round also included participation from Ribbit, Coinbase Ventures, HSG, DCG, Pebblebed, Topology, Primitive Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Anagram, and several angel investors.
Founded by Stanford professor Jan Liphardt, OpenMind is developing technologies that aim to enable decentralized coordination and interoperability across robotic systems. Its two primary offerings, OM1 and FABRIC, are designed to create a shared framework for machine collaboration regardless of hardware or manufacturer.
OM1 is described by the company as a hardware-agnostic operating system intended to integrate intelligent machines into real-world environments. FABRIC is a protocol that allows robots to verify identity, share contextual data, and securely coordinate across physical and digital spaces. OpenMind states that together, these systems form a trust-based coordination layer enabling cross-vendor robotic collaboration.
The company positions its work as complementary to ongoing development in robotic hardware, with OM1 and FABRIC serving as middleware infrastructure that supports communication, learning, and cooperation between machines in various domains, including logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing.
The investment will be used to expand OpenMind’s engineering team and support collaborations with robotics companies globally. The company is targeting applications ranging from autonomous transport to elder care, aiming to establish a common intelligence framework for networked robotic systems.
Pantera Capital partner Nihal Maunder said the infrastructure OpenMind is building parallels foundational developments in open-source software and decentralized computing. Other investors also cited the platform’s potential to support scalable and secure robotic deployment in complex environments.
Liphardt: “If AI is the brain and robotics is the body, coordination is the nervous system,” Liphardt said. “Without it, there’s no intelligence – just motion. We’re building the system that lets machines reason, act and evolve together.”
