European Physical AI Startup Joins SPRIND Next Frontier Program
Ontic Labs, a Tübingen-based AI startup co-founded by renowned machine learning researcher Wieland Brendel, has been selected for the prestigious Next Frontier AI Challenge organized by Germany's Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND). The company is one of only ten teams across Europe chosen from a highly competitive pool to receive up to €3 million in Stage 1 equity-free funding, within a broader €125 million program spanning three stages.
Brendel, who serves as Principal Investigator at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Research Group Leader at the Tübingen AI Center, brings deep expertise in robust machine learning and computer vision to the venture. His co-founders — Omid Taheri, Mikel Zhobro, Gerard Pons-Moll, and Georg Martius — unite researchers and engineers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the University of Tübingen, and the ELLIS Institute.
World Models for Physical Intelligence
At the core of Ontic Labs' mission is addressing one of the most important missing pieces in modern AI: understanding of the physical world. Today's generative models excel at predicting words and generating images, but they lack a grasp of objects, physics, materials, and cause and effect — the kind of intuitive physical understanding that humans acquire through childhood interaction with the real world.
Ontic Labs builds foundation models for physical intelligence: world models that learn how the world works from large-scale video. Instead of being programmed for narrow tasks, robots equipped with these models can draw on that understanding to navigate, manipulate, and adapt in complex, unpredictable real-world environments. The ambition is to learn the physics of the world once — and apply it everywhere.
From Lab Startup to Global Competitor
The SPRIND program is designed to narrow the field systematically. Over the next 24 months, the ten initial teams will be reduced to up to three labs positioned to become globally competitive European frontier AI companies. Ontic Labs intends to be among them.
The selection marks a significant milestone for Europe's growing Physical AI ecosystem, which has historically lagged behind the US and China in both funding and commercial deployment. With backing from SPRIND and a founding team drawn from top European research institutions, Ontic Labs represents a growing cohort of European startups aiming to close that gap.
What This Means for Robotics
The implications for robotics are substantial. If world models trained on video can reliably predict physical outcomes — how objects will move, fall, deform, or respond to forces — they could dramatically reduce the amount of task-specific training currently required for each robot deployment. This would accelerate the transition from carefully programmed industrial robots to general-purpose machines that can adapt to novel situations on the fly.
Ontic Labs joins a growing field of companies pursuing video-based world models for robotics, including Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and several well-funded startups. The company's European base and SPRIND backing position it uniquely within a landscape dominated by US and Chinese players.
