HIVE raises $15 million to build a single AI brain for every industrial machine

HIVE, a London-based physical AI company founded in Norway in 2020, has raised $15 million (€13.1 million) in a pre-Series A led by SuperSeed, with participation from US energy investor Veriten, Norwegian seed funds Skyfall Ventures and state-backed climate investor Nysnø, and two angel investors: Børge Hald (founder of Medallia) and Jørn Lyseggen (founder of Meltwater). The company is led by founder and CEO Christoffer Jørgensvaag.

One brain, any machine

HIVE's premise is that the industrial automation market is broken in a specific and fixable way. Every machine type — forklifts, excavators, conveyors, warehouse robots — runs its own proprietary software stack. Each deployment is a custom integration. None of it learns from the others. The result is that scale doesn't compound: the hundredth site is as expensive to automate as the first.

HIVE builds what it calls the silicon brain: a reinforcement-learning platform designed to act as a general-purpose AI controller for any industrial machine. It perceives the machine's physical environment through sensors, decides on an action, and executes it — without cloud connectivity and without retraining for each new machine type or brand. The company reports 80% reductions in machine-hour costs in live deployments across Scandinavia, with roughly 52 employees now building out the platform.

Jørgensvaag frames the ambition in terms that separate physical AI from the software AI wave: "We've spent the past few months securing top international talent to support the next phase of growth. The silicon brain is taking shape; with live deployments and strong market traction, we are well positioned to lead the next era of physical AI."

The investor logic

SuperSeed led the round with a thesis that takes the compounding claim seriously. "SuperSeed backs the rare founders who can see a category before it exists and have the technical depth to build it," managing partner Mads Jensen said. "HIVE's silicon brain is powerful enough to retrofit existing industrial fleets, and the intelligence compounds in value with every hour it runs. That is the defining wave of physical AI for the next decade."

The supporting cast reflects where HIVE's live deployments sit and where it wants to go next. Veriten, an energy-sector-focused investor, brings reach into one of the largest categories of industrial machine operations globally. Nysnø connects HIVE's Norwegian origins to a Scandinavian industrial base that already hosts live deployments. The angel investors — Hald and Lyseggen — bring credibility with enterprise B2B buyers at scale, which is the distribution problem HIVE must solve.

Funds go to platform development, AI and robotics talent, deepening existing commercial partnerships, and an expansion into the US market — the logical next geography given Veriten's network.

On the same day, Oxfordshire-based Luffy AI closed a £8.1 million Series A for neuroplastic AI embedded in industrial motors — edge-only, no cloud, same structural thesis applied to a different slice of the industrial hardware stack. Two teams, two investor groups, one week: the direction of travel in industrial AI is becoming harder to ignore.