Archetype AI Team
Physical AI is becoming a reality. After years of IoT deployments and fragmented machine-learning pilots, the missing piece — a unified intelligence layer for the physical world — is finally possible. Today, Archetype introduces Physical Agents: deployable, real-time applications that interpret the physical world and act on it. These agents are powered by Newton, Archetype’s proprietary foundation model for multimodal physical-world sensing.
With Physical Agents, intelligence is no longer confined to screens or cloud services — it lives inside machines, physical infrastructure, and real-world environments themselves. Read on to learn how Physical Agents work, why this architecture matters, and why we believe they will power the next generation of real-world intelligence.
AI Goes into the Real World
Today's physical environments generate enormous volumes of multimodal data — far richer and more complex than the text and images that power today's LLMs. This data spans hundreds of sensor types continuously measuring the state of machines, environments, and people, alongside video, logs, and contextual signals. Yet only a tiny portion of it is accessible or interpretable to the people who rely on it. Indeed, across industries, experts spend 40% to 60% of their time simply wrestling raw sensor streams into usable formats — and even then, they struggle to extract meaningful insights.
IoT has already connected the physical world and given us sensors everywhere. What's still missing is the intelligence layer — the ability for operators and frontline teams to turn diverse signals into understanding and action, right on the factory floor, in the field, or in the control room. This is why we built Newton, a Physical AI foundation model that generalizes across the physical world's sensors and tasks — an intelligence engine that brings real-time understanding to anyone, anywhere.
Today, we're taking a major step in bringing Physical AI into real-world operations. We're introducing Physical Agents — applications built on Newton that continuously interpret multimodal data and deliver actionable local intelligence.
These agents are the real-world form factor of Physical AI, embedded directly into machines, infrastructure, and environments where insight is needed. They detect anomalies, verify workflows, monitor processes, predict failures, and guide operators in real time. This is how Physical AI becomes practical and deployable: intelligence running locally and delivering support exactly when and where it's needed.
The Archetype platform offers a solution for building and deploying Physical Agents through a unified technology stack:
- Foundation Model: Newton learns the physics, patterns, and behaviors of real systems — including human activity.
- Platform: The Archetype platform exposes that intelligence through APIs, sensor integrations, and a range of development tools to simplify building and deploying agents.
- Physical Agents: Developers and operators can create task-specific applications using natural language and multimodal prompts.
- Use Cases: Agents deliver concrete value like monitoring processes, preventing downtime, enforcing safety, guiding workflows, and more.
Physical Agents: Toward Local Intelligence
Unlike LLM agents that live entirely in digital spaces, Physical Agents interpret multimodal signals from the real world in real time — providing context-aware, real-time intelligence tied to specific locations, assets, and operations.
This is how Physical Agents solve real-world problems today:
Build on top of a Physical AI foundation model: Physical Agents are powered by Newton, our proprietary foundation model designed specifically for real-world environments. Newton fuses video, time-series signals, environmental inputs, and contextual information to continuously understand and predict how physical systems behave in real time.
Out-of-the-box sensor fusion: Newton fuses video, signals, environmental data, and context to deliver insights, recommendations, and automation with minimal additional customer data or fine-tuning. This dramatically simplifies and accelerates deployment. The unified representation also reveals hidden states, patterns, and anomalies that narrow single-sensor systems cannot detect. Physical Agents can add a powerful layer of intelligence on top of existing sensing infrastructure — no new hardware required.
Deploy anywhere, with full data sovereignty: Physical Agents run in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge to provide secure, low-latency intelligence exactly where decisions are made. They operate inside physical environments, giving organizations real-time insight while keeping complete control over their data.
Build and iterate with natural language: Developers and operators can design and refine Agents through natural-language instructions and multimodal prompts. No complex pipelines are required — simply describe the task or behavior you want, and the Agent adapts. Physical AI becomes accessible to teams without specialized ML skills.
Turn-key Agents solution: Customers can build custom Agents using the platform APIs, or visually prototype and evaluate them in Agent Toolkit, our no-code development environment. The platform also includes ready-to-use, prebuilt Physical Agents that can be quickly onboarded — enabling enterprises to deploy value-generating intelligence in weeks, not years.
Archetype Platform: Build and Deploy Agents Today
The Archetype platform enables teams of any size to create and deploy Physical Agents for any industry or use case — with little or no ML expertise required. To accelerate development, we’re also providing prebuilt template Agents for the most common and high-value use cases. These Agents work out of the box and can be quickly adapted to each customer’s specific needs.
Process Monitoring Agent: Real-time understanding of critical operations
The Process Monitoring Agent delivers a continuous, multimodal understanding of equipment and process behavior across turbines, CNC machines, assembly lines, and chemical systems. By fusing vibration, current, temperature, acoustics, and more, it identifies early-stage anomalies that reliability engineers typically can’t see with single-sensor tools. This allows teams to intervene sooner, extend asset life, and reduce maintenance overhead while improving process stability.
Task Verification Agent: Real-time workflow assurance
Automatically verify that operators follow the correct workflows and procedures — whether during assembly, maintenance, calibration, or quality checks. By analyzing multimodal data, including video and process signals, the Agent confirms that each step occurs in the proper order and immediately detects deviations, omissions, or unsafe actions.
This reduces human error, improves compliance, minimizes defects, and accelerates both servicing and production throughput. The result is more consistent operations, higher output quality, and safer, more reliable execution across every shift and site.
Safety Agent: Identify hazards and enforce safety in real time
By analyzing multimodal data — including video, audio, and sensor signals — the Agent detects unsafe or unauthorized behaviors, hazardous conditions, and policy violations as they occur, triggering immediate alerts to prevent accidents or security breaches.
This reduces workplace incidents, strengthens safety and security compliance, protects equipment and personnel, and ensures consistent adherence to safety protocols. The result is a safer, more controlled environment with fewer disruptions, lower operational risk, and higher organizational confidence.
The Future of Physical AI
Physical AI is not just a better robot or a self-driving car. The real value — and the real future — of Physical AI is to become a foundational intelligence layer for the entire physical world, from which real solutions emerge. It can organize the cacophony of events, measurements, and context produced by the physical world into valuable insights, recommendations, and actions — expressed in the most natural way for humans.
By fusing every kind of physical data into a unified understanding of how complex systems around us behave, the Archetype Platform moves us toward that future and enables what IoT could never fully deliver: intelligence embedded directly into the physical world, powering thousands of practical, real-world applications through simple, tangible Physical Agents.
With our recent Series A fundraise, we're doubling down on our vision of deployable, accessible, and usable Physical AI designed to solve the toughest real-world problems. This is a step toward a world where intelligence is distributed everywhere around us — not confined to screens or the cloud, but embedded directly into the physical systems that make our lives better.
