Xaba, a startup building synthetic brains for industrial robots with zero code, announced it has secured a $6 million seed investment led by Hitachi Ventures.

The Toronto startup said the extension to its seed round will accelerate the deployment of AI-powered robotics and cognitive industrial control systems.

Hitachi Ventures led the round using funds from its new $400 million fund, with participation from Hazelview Ventures, BDC, Exposition Ventures, and Impact Venture Capital.

Xaba is pioneering the application of industrial artificial intelligence (AI) to remake manufacturing processes. Its flagship product, xCognition, empowers industrial robots and collaborative robots (cobots) with AI-driven cognition and awareness, enabling them to autonomously generate programs and execute complex tasks such as welding, drilling, assembling, and additive manufacturing.

By integrating real-time intelligence into automation, Xaba’s solutions significantly reduce deployment costs and enhance the quality, consistency, and flexibility of manufacturing operations. The company said it is taking aim at a $9 trillion opportunity. The shortage of skilled robotics programmers and control engineers creates even more challenges for companies to scale automation effectively.

Massimiliano Moruzzi, CEO of Xaba, said in an interview with GamesBeat that industrial automation remains highly inefficient, relying on outdated controllers, rigid programming, and extensive manual intervention. Programming and deploying industrial robots alone cost the industry $7 billion annually, with 80% of automation costs stemming from manually developing logic for industrial controllers. 

“Our vision is to disrupt the giants. What we’re developing is what I call a synthetic brain for information, or cognitive control,” said Moruzzi.

Similar to what Open AI is doing for natural language commands for AI, Moruzzi said that Xaba is remaking factory language so that it can enable better automation, with the result being not only better robots for industrial purposes but also better human supervision and human support.

Xaba’s generative industrial AI equips machines wit...