Veeda AI, the Toronto-headquartered startup founded by computer vision researcher Sanja Fidler weeks after her departure from Nvidia, has raised more than US$90 million in seed financing, The Logic reported on August 19, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter and corporate filings. The round, backed by Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, ranks among the largest seed financings ever raised by a Canadian company, and it lands less than three months after Fidler and two former Nvidia colleagues incorporated the business.
The company, legally named Veeda Innovation, was incorporated in early June 2026, according to the filings The Logic reviewed. In late July it issued 60.6 million seed shares priced at US$1 each, and on the same day added two new directors: Radical partner Tomi Poutanen and Khosla partner Sven Strohband. Board seats for both firms alongside the share issuance are the standard paper trail of a priced seed round. Khosla confirmed to The Logic that it has backed the company.
Fidler spent eight years at Nvidia, joining in May 2018 to establish the chipmaker’s Toronto research unit, which later became the Spatial Intelligence Lab. She rose to vice president of AI research while holding her faculty position at the University of Toronto, where she has taught computer science since 2014, and she was a founding member of the Vector Institute, Toronto’s AI research and commercialization hub. Her co-founders are Huan Ling, who also worked at the Spatial Intelligence Lab and completed his doctorate under Fidler’s supervision, and Zan Gojcic, a Zurich-based former Nvidia research director.
“World models is where the next breakthrough lies, and it is around the corner,” Fidler wrote in the post announcing her Nvidia departure.
What Veeda Is Building
Veeda’s own site describes the company as building “multimodal foundation world models that simulate physical reality, creating infinitely scalable environments where embodied agents can learn through interaction.” The pitch is a specific technical wager: that robots cannot learn through trial and error in the real world, because physical mistakes are unsafe, hardware does not scale like compute, and real-world experience cannot be parallelized. The alternative is training inside high-fidelity simulated environments generated by world models, an approach the company frames as building “the Matrix” for physical AI.
The founders have run this playbook before. At the Spatial Intelligence Lab, Fidler’s team developed software simulating how autonomous vehicles and humanoid agents interact with the physical world, and Fidler and Ling were part of the group behind Nvidia’s flagship world model for developers building physical AI systems. Veeda lists offices in Toronto, Mountain View, Singapore, and Zurich, and a Swiss subsidiary registered in July names Gojcic as local managing director and Fidler as management chair. A job posting says the company is hiring to “push the frontier on generative world models,” including staff to prepare training data and manage chip clusters.
Khosla and Radical Keep Buying the Same Ticket
The investor pairing is the sharpest signal in the round. Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures have repeatedly co-backed research-heavy AI teams, and earlier in August 2026 the two firms co-led the founding round for Discovery Loop, the AI-for-science startup built by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Both firms also carry direct exposure to Veeda’s category. Radical is an investor in World Labs, the spatial intelligence company founded by its scientific partner Fei-Fei Li, and its portfolio includes Decart, which builds real-time world models. Khosla co-led autonomous trucking company Waabi’s US$750 million round in January 2026, with Radical participating; Waabi, led by University of Toronto professor and Vector co-founder Raquel Urtasun, builds its own world models for self-driving. Fidler’s former employer sits behind the category’s training infrastructure as well, with Nvidia treating spatial intelligence as a dedicated research line.
The capital intensity of the bet explains the check size. World model developers have drawn major financings: Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs raised US$1.03 billion in March 2026, and World Labs raised US$230 million in a round co-led by Radical Ventures. Against that cohort, Veeda’s US$90 million-plus seed is modest in absolute terms but lands near the top of Canada’s all-time seed rankings, per PitchBook data cited by The Logic, and it funds the two inputs that dominate a foundation lab’s early budget, research hires and compute.
