Vantora, the venture studio previously known as UP.Labs, has secured more than $100 million in growth investment from Silversmith Capital Partners. The funding, announced in September 2026, represents the first outside capital for the Los Angeles-based firm as it accelerates a strategy centered on building “AI-native” operating companies for the world’s largest industrial enterprises.
The rebrand and capital injection signal a shift in how industrial giants approach automation. Rather than licensing generic tools from third-party tech providers, Vantora’s partners—which include Porsche, Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, and Wabash—are moving toward a “Sovereign AI” model. Under this framework, corporations co-create startups with Vantora that are designed to be folded back into the parent company’s core business, ensuring they retain ownership of sensitive operational data and specialized intellectual property.
The investment comes as the industrial sector experiences a massive surge in capital deployment toward autonomous systems. According to Crunchbase News, global venture funding for physical AI reached $47.4 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, driven by demand for robotics, aerospace, and logistics automation that can operate in the real world.
Building the Industrial Intelligence Layer
Founded by CEO John Kuolt, Vantora functions as an “innovation engine” that identifies specific friction points within a partner’s operations—such as maintenance scheduling for airlines or fleet optimization for logistics firms. The firm then builds a standalone startup to solve that problem using AI and robotics. These startups are structured to provide a direct path to acquisition or integration by the corporate partner once they reach scale.
The firm targets a specific financial outcome for its partners, seeking to build businesses that can eventually contribute between $50 million and $100 million in EBITDA to the parent company’s core operations. By keeping these technologies in-house, Vantora claims its partners can avoid the “vendor lock-in” that often accompanies large-scale AI deployments in traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) models.
As part of the growth investment, Silversmith Capital Partners’ Todd MacLean, Danielle Waldman, and Annie Cory will join Vantora’s Board of Directors. The new capital is earmarked for expanding the firm’s internal team of engineers and operators and scaling its capacity to launch multiple AI-native companies simultaneously across the transportation, energy, and manufacturing sectors.
The move follows several years of established partnerships. Since 2022, Vantora has worked with Porsche to develop digital solutions for the automotive supply chain and helped Alaska Airlines launch initiatives focused on regional air mobility and operational efficiency. The transition to the Vantora brand and the focus on “physical AI” reflects an industry-wide realization that software intelligence must be deeply integrated with physical hardware and proprietary industrial datasets to provide a competitive advantage.
