The Pulse
Noetive Emerges With $41M for Self-Improving Industrial AI
Noetive has emerged from stealth with a $41 million seed round led by Eclipse. The startup is building self-improving AI software and multimodal sensing hardware for manufacturing, logistics, energy and data centers.
AI.info Team ·
“AI will transform and reimagine the potential of companies in the physical economy, but current AI solutions were designed for information work living on the internet.”
Amir Frenkel, CEO and co-founder, Noetive
Noetive emerged from stealth on September 16, 2026, with $41 million in seed funding and a plan to build AI systems for factories, logistics networks, energy operations and data centers. Eclipse led the round, which also includes Craft Ventures, The Westly Group, Swish Ventures, Factory, Incite Ventures, Gigascale Capital, Operator Partners and Liquid 2 Ventures.
The San Francisco company describes itself as an “AI NeoLab” for operational technology. Its stated goal is to create an “intelligence of record” for the physical economy: software that learns how a business operates, works with its employees and coordinates people, machines and digital systems.
Noetive Puts a Self-Improving Model Inside Existing Operations
Noetive’s system has two main components. The first is a self-improving AI “brain” designed to learn from the way a company runs. The second is a set of “eyes and ears” in the form of a multimodal sensing pod, which the company says helps the system perceive physical conditions alongside information from business software.
The company says its agents sit on top of tools that operators already use rather than requiring businesses to replace their existing systems. Those agents are intended to handle operational problems end to end, coordinating information across people, machinery, inventory, transportation and suppliers.
Noetive also claims that each deployment makes the system more capable by supplying additional operational data and real-world feedback. The company says it is testing the approach with a selected group of design partners across manufacturing, logistics, energy and data centers.
Steuben Foods Reports Faster Production Planning
Steuben Foods is one of the design partners named in the announcement. Menachem Katz, the company’s CEO, said Noetive’s system connects data from Steuben’s existing systems with conditions on the factory floor.
“Work that once happened monthly and took a week of planning now happens daily and takes minutes, allowing us to respond to new orders and changing market conditions in real time.”
Menachem Katz, CEO, Steuben Foods
Katz’s account describes a specific use case for Noetive’s approach: production planning that must account for changes across an operating facility rather than answer a question from a single database. Noetive says its system is designed to update those decisions as conditions change.
Eclipse Built Noetive Around Physical Operations
Noetive was built with Eclipse rather than financed as a conventional outside investment. Frenkel joined Eclipse as its chief AI officer after serving as a vice president at Meta for nearly a decade and holding leadership roles at Alphabet and Amazon. The company says its broader team includes AI researchers, engineers, product leaders and enterprise operators with experience at Meta, Google, Amazon and Fortune 500 companies.
Eclipse founder and CEO Lior Susan framed the company around the gap between software-based work and the physical businesses that depend on machinery, materials and workers.
“AI has transformed the digital world, but the $30 trillion physical economy has largely been left behind. We saw an enormous opportunity to change that, and built Noetive to go after it.”
Lior Susan, founder and CEO, Eclipse
The investor group includes Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Airbnb CTO and former Meta vice president of generative AI Ahmad Al-Dahle, Nest co-founder Matt Rogers, Gigascale Capital founder Mike Schroepfer and the co-founders of Decart AI: Dean Leitersdorf, Moshe Shalev and Orian Leitersdorf.
The $41 Million Will Fund Field Research
Noetive says it will use the funding for research into self-improving AI for physical operations, field deployments with design partners and expansion of its research and engineering staff. The company is hiring AI researchers and full-stack engineers.
The announcement does not disclose revenue, customer contracts or technical performance benchmarks. Its clearest published result comes from Steuben Foods’ description of a planning process that shifted from monthly work taking a week to daily work taking minutes. Noetive’s broader claim—that deployments will make its systems increasingly capable—will depend on whether the software can generalize across the varied conditions found in factories, supply chains and other industrial sites.