Capital will fuel product development, hiring, and expansion into large-scale manufacturing
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / November 20, 2025 / Parallax Worlds, the company building hyper-realistic simulations to stress-test robots before deployment, today announced a $4 million seed round, bringing total pre-seed and seed funding to $4.9 million. The round was led by Pear VC, with participation from GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, and Lightscape Partners, alongside angels and groups including Gaingels, Nova Threshold, and Mana Ventures. Prior backers include Conviction (Embed), Unusual Ventures, Spacecadet Ventures (co-leads of the pre-seed), and Boost VC.
Modern factories and warehouses want to adopt robots to meet reshoring goals and close labor gaps, but getting from pilot to production is slow, expensive, and risky. Even simple automation projects can take a year and require extensive on-site testing to achieve the uptime and reliability that production lines demand. Parallax Worlds eliminates that bottleneck by letting robotics builders and operators exhaustively test, measure, and validate performance in a high-fidelity digital twin before any hardware touches the floor.
"Production-grade reliability is the gap between a great demo and a great deployment," said Tanmay Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Parallax Worlds. "Factories can't afford robots that fail even for seconds; they need reliable performance and defensible ROI. Parallax Worlds gives builders and operators a way to measure reliability upfront, compress on-site iteration, and move from pilot to production faster."
Parallax Worlds' vertically integrated platform turns simple video capture (e.g., an iPhone walkthrough) into an accurate, interactive 3D environment. Today, teams can generate fully navigable digital twins from video and run interactive simulations using real robot software. The platform is actively expanding to support cloud-scale execution of thousands of edge-case scenarios and to deliver automated reliability, cost, and ROI metrics tied to specific tasks and site conditions. It integrates with industry physics engines and tooling (e.g., NVIDIA Omniverse, Unreal, Unity) while adding the missing layers, including fast video-to-3D, robotics-specific behaviors, and AI-assisted scenario generation.
"Parallax is building the missing simulation layer that bridges robotics R&D and real-world deployment by virtualizing physical spaces to make testing and reliability scalable," said Payam Banazadeh, Visiting Partner, Pear VC. "Their digital-twin platform turns simulation into a true reliability engine, transforming what used to take years of costly trial and error into weeks of virtual iteration. It's the kind of foundational shift that will redefine how entire industries build and trust automation, and we're proud to back the Parallax team as they make this vision a reality."
The company is led by a founding team with deep roots in both advanced robotics and industrial automation. Agarwal trained in Stanford's robotics community under Prof. Fei-Fei Li and Prof. Jiajun Wu, and has developed software for systems ranging from home robots to self-driving vehicles. Aumkar Renavikar, Co-Founder and CTO, studied robotics at UIUC and supported factory-floor automation initiatives at BMW and Michelin, grounding the company's approach in real industrial requirements.
The company has signed multiple robotics companies across manufacturing, construction, and select consumer-service use cases, including Orangewood Labs (industrial robots for manufacturing), BotBuilt (robots for home construction), and Rainier Labs (mobile welding robots).
"Parallax lets us validate robot behavior against real factory conditions using our actual control software," said Abhinav Das, CEO at Orangewood Labs. "Being able to iterate on perception, planning, and edge-case handling before hardware is deployed materially accelerates our development cycle."
With the new round, the company will expand into large enterprise manufacturing, while continuing to grow within its robotics-builder customer base. Funds will be used for product R&D, hiring, and go-to-market.
Reshoring and American dynamism demand more automation, but today only the largest manufacturers can shoulder the cost and time of traditional deployment cycles. By shifting reliability testing into a realistic virtual environment, Parallax Worlds aims to democratize access to robotics, enabling more factories and warehouses to adopt automation with confidence.
To learn more about the platform and schedule a demo, visit https://www.parallaxworlds.com/.
###
ABOUT PARALLAX WORLDS:
Parallax Worlds provides hyper-realistic simulation software to stress-test robots before deployment. The company's platform transforms everyday video into high-fidelity digital twins and runs cloud-scale simulations with robotics-specific behaviors and AI-generated scenarios, delivering reliability, safety, and ROI insights before hardware hits the factory floor. Parallax Worlds is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at parallaxworlds.com.
MEDIA CONTACT: Nina Pfister, MAG PR at nina@mooringadvisorygroup.com.
SOURCE: Parallax Worlds
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire