UP.Labs rebrands as Vantora with $100M to build physical AI for industrial customers

UP.Labs, the startup builder that spent four years creating companies alongside big corporate partners, is now called Vantora — and it has $100 million in new capital to spend on physical AI.

The money comes from Silversmith Capital Partners and is the firm's first outside investment, TechCrunch reported on September 18. Vantora launched in 2022 with Porsche as its first corporate partner, and it was never financially tied to Up.Partners, the California venture firm it still shares office space with.

The original model was unusual: not quite an incubator, an accelerator, or a venture fund. Vantora builds startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers, which invest in the ventures and serve as their first customer. Its roster has included Porsche, Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash, and TDG, the parent of Ashley Furniture; it has also added unnamed customers in industrial manufacturing and in oil and gas.

What has changed is where those startups end up. Vantora is now focused on building companies solely for its corporate customers rather than for the broader market. Founder and CEO John Kuolt calls the strategy a “proprietary M&A pipeline”: corporate partners can now fold the startups into their core businesses and keep them.

That shift pushed Vantora further into physical AI. Kuolt said the firm used to spike ideas that were strategically important to partners but too sensitive to expose. “Imagine you're a Fortune 100 industrial company and you need to retrofit all of your hardware and machines for autonomy,” he told TechCrunch. “You need to own that, it needs to be sovereign, and you can't rely on a third party to go do that for you.”

J.B. Hunt is his example: Vantora came up with an idea to use AI to advance the company's business, but the partner said it could never be taken to the outside world, so the project was shelved. Under the proprietary model, that class of work is back on the table and the firm says it can now “unlock big physical AI use cases.”

The implication is that the exit path for these startups is no longer an IPO or an outside acquisition — it is absorption by the parent company. For corporate customers, that means AI capability stops being something they buy and becomes something they own outright.

The open question is whether a pipeline built exclusively for single customers can scale, and what happens to the pace of innovation when the same physical AI technology is never allowed to compete in an open market.