Vantora, the startup lab formerly known as UP.Labs, has raised $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners — its first outside investment — and is shifting to a model that keeps the startups it builds inside its corporate partners’ businesses. The four-year-old company says it is neither an incubator, accelerator, nor venture firm; it builds startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers. Previously those ventures could also serve the broader market. Now, according to founder and CEO John Kuolt, Vantora is moving toward a “proprietary M&A pipeline”: partners still invest in the startups and act as first customers, but they can fold the ventures into their core operations and essentially keep them for themselves.

That change has pushed Vantora deeper into physical AI. Kuolt explained that in the past, the firm had to drop ideas that were strategically valuable to a partner but too sensitive to expose to outside competitors. He gave the example of a Fortune 100 industrial company needing to retrofit all its hardware and machines for autonomy: the company must own that intelligence layer and cannot rely on a third party, and it would never let the startup sell the same capability to competitors. Because of that, Vantora was missing “the biggest value problems, which had the biggest upside.” The proprietary model now lets it unlock large physical AI use cases. He said Vantora came up with an idea to use AI to advance the business of partner J.B. Hunt, but the partner said Vantora could not take it to the world, so the firm passed on it; under the new model it can pursue it.

Vantora launched in 2022 with Porsche as its first corporate partner. Since then it has launched several startups for Porsche and struck deals with Alaska Airlines, J.B. Hunt, Wabash, and TDG, the parent of Ashley Furniture. It is also working with corporate customers in industrial manufacturing, which it declined to name, and in oil and gas. Although UP.Labs was tied in its early days to venture firm Up.Partners, Kuolt said that connection was never financial and Vantora is its own entity; it still shares office space with the California-based VC. Silversmith’s $100 million is the company’s first outside investment.