Building the foundation
of visual thinking
We believe building systems that natively understand and reason through the visual medium the way humans do is the most important work in AI today.
We're enabling models to think through spatial relationships, physical constraints, design intent, and abstractions to reach complex, creative solutions that work in the physical world.
Research Focus
The Gap
Visual thinking precedes language. Babies first learn to understand and navigate the world around them through sight and touch long before they speak. A great coach can identify a flaw in an athlete's stride, swing, or stroke at a single glance. Designers convey ideas not through words, but through sketches and images. Scientists peer through lenses to observe the natural world at its grandest and tiniest scales. If AI is going to accelerate technological progress in these areas, we will need tools that, like humans, are grounded in visual thinking from the very beginning.
Vision
Current AI systems remain dependent on text. Today's vision language models reason in a two-step process: first translating visual inputs into language, and then performing text-based reasoning, sometimes with tools. No matter how advanced the subsequent reasoning, this chain is fragile, limited, and prone to hallucination. Since many visual tasks cannot be precisely (or concisely) described, today's models struggle with tasks that even children can handle effortlessly.
Thinking
While there has been impressive progress in models that can produce photos and videos, this generative capability does not directly translate to reasoning about visual content. The widening gap between how models perform on tasks like coding, and visual tasks where the information cannot be easily described in words, runs deeper than existing benchmark performance. Developing models capable of understanding the spatial, structural, and relational complexity of the visual world will require fundamentally new techniques.
Recent News
See all pressWatch Former Google Deepmind Researcher on New AI Startup
Watch on Bloomberg TVThis new AI model thinks in images, not just words
Read on Fast CompanyNext Billion-Dollar Startups 2026
Read on ForbesHow Elorian AI pulled off a $300M pre-seed valuation
Listen on TechCrunch Build ModeAI Still Sees Like a Toddler. Andrew Dai Wants to Fix It
Watch on The NeuronElorian is backed by $55 million in funding from Striker Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Altimeter with participation from NVIDIA, 49 Palms and others with prominent AI researchers including Jeff Dean. We will invest deeply in the research required to push this new frontier.
We believe visual thinking is a critical step toward that future — if you do too, join us.
