Core Automation raises a $100M seed at $1B

The round closed within weeks of the company's founding in late March 2026 in San Francisco. Jerry Tworek, a former OpenAI vice president of research, started it with co-founders including Rohan Anil and Joanne Jang. Data aggregators also list Accel, Nvidia and Spark Capital among the seed backers. TechCrunch describes an enterprise workflow product, but other sources describe an AI research lab with no public product, API or customers. Its stated aim is to automate its own research using continual learning, architectures meant to outscale transformers, and far less training data. The Information reported on May 7 that it was seeking $300M to $500M at roughly a $4B valuation. Aggregators then logged a roughly $432M filing in July at a $3.62B post-money valuation. Investor participation in that filing was not disclosed, so treat the figures as unconfirmed. For founders, the signal is that "neolabs" can stack rounds before shipping anything, with Nvidia's backing a factor. That raises the bar for early-stage model companies and pulls researchers away from larger labs. Founders outside this tier should expect investors to compare them with these valuations.