NeoCognition Emerges from Stealth to Build Expert AI Agents

NeoCognition is emerging from stealth with $40 million in seed funding to build a new class of AI agents—designed not just to respond, but to learn, adapt, and become true domain experts over time.

The round was co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Cambium Capital, with participation from Vista Equity Partners and a group of leading investors and AI researchers.

NeoCognition was founded to address a fundamental limitation in today’s AI systems. Despite rapid progress, AI agents remain unreliable, often succeeding only around half of the time in real-world tasks, limiting their ability to operate at scale. NeoCognition is taking a different approach: building agents that learn like humans, continuously improving through experience to develop deep, domain-specific expertise rather than relying only on static training.

This shift marks an important evolution in AI, from general-purpose models toward specialized intelligence. As enterprises increasingly look to deploy AI in real workflows, they require systems that can do more than generate responses. They need agents that can adapt, build expertise over time, and operate with greater accuracy and reliability in complex domains.

NeoCognition’s approach is designed to meet that need. By enabling agents to learn on the job, refine their understanding, and improve performance through use, the company is advancing a new generation of AI systems that become more valuable over time. This has the potential to unlock more durable and effective applications across enterprise software, decision-making, and knowledge-intensive workflows.

NeoCognition was founded by a team with deep roots in AI research and agent-based systems, led by Yu Su, and including researchers behind one of the most established AI agent labs in the field. The team combines cutting-edge academic work with hands-on experience building real-world AI systems, positioning the company uniquely at the intersection of research and deployment.

With recent advances in foundation models creating the conditions for greater specialization, NeoCognition is well positioned to help define what comes next.

At Walden Catalyst Ventures, we invest in the foundational technologies shaping the future of computing. We believe the next wave of AI will be defined not only by scale, but by specialization: systems that can learn continuously, operate with domain depth, and deliver meaningful outcomes in the real world. NeoCognition reflects that shift, and we are proud to support the team at this early stage.