May 2026 Update

SPC's May 2026 update highlights major fundraises including Cognition's $1B Series D and Recursive's $650M round, along with events in SF, NYC, and Bangalore featuring humanoids, drones, and cybersecurity research. Member launches include Vori's self-driving OS for grocery stores and Goodfire's Silico platform for AI model building.

May 2026 Update Humanoids, drones, cybersecurity, model-memory research May brought new fundraises, new research, and a packed calendar across SF, NYC, and Bangalore. If you’re interested in joining SPC, apply here. Events at SPC In NYC, Soleio hosted a Design Chat with Dylan Babbs , SPC alum and current CTO at Profound . In Bangalore we hosted - 1 to Razorpay , where Harshil Mathur unpacked the challenge of building payments infrastructure at planetary scale, and with -1 to Space https://x.com/adityaag/status/2060029206105600285 , actual astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla. In SF, Demo Night showcased explorations at the edge of what’s possible: model memory research, tactile hardware-software interfaces, and new operating systems for an agentic world. The month closed with the SPC Embodied AI Hackathon, where teams designed and completed a challenge to bring intelligence into the physical world involving manipulation, locomotion, simulation, or flight, with bonus points for collaboration. We ran SPC as a fully-stocked robotics lab including humanoids, drones, SO-101 arms, and 3D printers. From the Desktop Robot Assistant https://x.com/southpkcommons/status/2057876338753900946 , which moved a candy bar using voice agents, VLMs, and ACT policies, to the autonomous drone that tracks your squats https://x.com/southpkcommons/status/2057876342482579553 and coaches your form in real-time, many teams had end-to-end policies running on real hardware by the end of the weekend. Member Updates Product Launches & Company News Cognition raised over $1B in a Series D https://cognition.ai/blog/series-d at a $26B valuation led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC. Recursive raised $650M https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/recursive-superintelligence-funding-ai.html at a $4.65B valuation led by GV and Greycroft, building AI that recursively improves itself via open-ended algorithms. Vori raised $22M in a Series B https://www.vori.com/b to build the self-driving OS for grocery stores, processing over $500M in payments across 55 cities. Goodfire launched Silico https://www.goodfire.ai/silico , a platform for building AI models with the precision of written software. VMax published PopuLoRA https://vmax.ai/team/populora-co-evolving-llm-populations-for-reasoning-self-play , research on co-evolving LLM populations for reasoning self-play. Asymptote Labs open-sourced Agent Beacon https://github.com/Asymptote-Labs/agent-beacon , a tool for AI agent security. Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications Rex released PathOn Robotics https://x.com/RexDQZhang/status/2053595781492535467 , showing a custom navigation stack running on a Unitree Go2. Arya published a piece on debugging multi-agent systems https://aryatafvizi.substack.com/p/beyond-tracing-understanding-multi , with a follow-up case study on iterative refinement https://open.substack.com/pub/aryatafvizi/p/iterative-refinement-of-a-multi-agent . Jake shared a directory of 12,000+ open-source STEP parts https://x.com/soft servo/status/2054716756690948107 for mechanical and electrical engineering, and released text-to-cad https://x.com/earthtojake/status/2057203608207466982 for generating 3D models in coding agents. Coming Up Recent Content We released new conversations with Nikesh Arora Palo Alto Networks , Luma AI , and Amit Jain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qR7pLTCZ78&t=7s tldraw covering everything from why the most defensible AI companies are building world models, to the infinite canvas as a use case for agents, to the cybersecurity crisis ahead. Steve Ruiz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNUEaFmPAwc Thanks for reading The work continues.