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Vangrid, a Dutch startup developing a decentralised spatial intelligence network to be deployed on smartphones, has raised $9 million in seed funding.
Vangrid’s goal is to make high-fidelity spatial data accessible at the scale and frequency Physical AI actually demands, without requiring dedicated capture hardware.
The platform activates the cameras and sensors already in billions of smartphones, turning ordinary phones into a distributed capture network.
This zero-hardware format allows everyday users, not just fleets of specialised vehicles, to generate continuously updated ground-truth data, taking a street or city from uncaptured to enterprise-ready in the time it takes to walk through it.
Vangrid sits between two extremes: legacy mapping methods that rely on slow, expensive, centrally-owned vehicle fleets, and open crowdsourcing efforts that lack verification and enterprise-grade quality. It gives contributors a direct path to compensation and gives customers verified, provenance-tracked data they can trust. With Vangrid, the network scales at the speed of app downloads, not procurement cycles, and is built for continuous, real-time refresh, not a one-time capture.
The onchain verification and edge-computation layer is central to delivering on this promise at scale. Faces and license plates are blurred on-device before any data leaves the phone, and each capture is verified onchain for provenance before reaching the enterprise spatial API.
This approach lets Vangrid guarantee data integrity without operating a centralised fleet, and lets the team focus resources on network density and the AI-native tooling that customers use directly.
According to Robert Brighton, CEO of Vangrid:
“We are the eyes for the next generation of AI. Without a decentralised perception grid, billion-dollar robots will remain blind to dynamic human environments.
This round, and the calibre of partners now standing beside us, signals that the market recognises spatial ground truth as the foundational infrastructure needed for the Physical AI era.”
The company welcomed HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs, and Mapleblock, as key stakeholders.
The company has signed a fresh set of MOUs with strategic data partners and is actively engaging with organisations building defence and robotics platforms. Real transactions are already flowing through the platform, validating both sides of the grid.
The funding will support Vangrid’s network bootstrapping, expand its edge-computation pipeline, and deepen enterprise partnerships across defence and autonomous systems.