MIT-born startup Foundation EGI has launched the world’s first domain-specific agentic AI platform for engineering. In addition to this, the company was backed by an oversubscribed $7.6 million seed funding round led by a strong syndicate of deep-tech believers, including The E14 Fund (MIT’s flagship VC), Union Lab Ventures, Stata Venture Partners, Samsung Ventures, GRIDS Capital, and industrial magnate Henry Ford III.
The fresh funding will be directed toward several key growth areas. Versant plans to expand its engineering and product development teams to accelerate innovation and platform capabilities. It will also scale up enterprise pilots while onboarding new clients to drive adoption. In parallel, the company aims to enhance integration with leading engineering tools and advance its core large language model to support more specialised domains within manufacturing.
The expensive inefficiency that engineering forgot
While industries like finance and healthcare have been transformed by digital technologies, engineering and manufacturing remain heavily manual, fragmented, and inefficient, resulting in a staggering $8 trillion in economic waste annually. Processes are often reliant on human-written, vague instructions and inconsistent workflows, creating friction across design, prototyping, and production.
Foundation EGI directly tackles this problem by transforming raw, natural language inputs into clean, structured code that engineering systems can actually use, improving automation, accuracy, and production speed.
Idea born from MIT labs
The startup was co-founded by Mok Oh, Ph.D., a serial entrepreneur and former MIT academic; Professor Wojciech Matusik, a leading authority in computer graphics and AI-driven design; and Michael Foshey, a researcher and engineer focused on intelligent manufacturing systems. The trio brings decades of combined experience in AI, industrial automation, and academic research.
Their mission was catalysed by a 2024 MIT paper titled “Large Language Models for Design and Manufacturing,” co-authored by Matusik and Foshey, which laid the scientific groundwork for EGI’s technology.
Introducing EGI: The first agentic AI for engineers
Foundation EGI’s platform is built on a proprietary domain-specific large language model (LLM) fine-tuned on engineering processes. It enables agentic AI, where intelligent agents can operate within existing engineering software and workflows to interpret complex instructions, automate repetitive tasks, and ensure compliance across the lifecycle.
Engineers can simply describe design needs in natural language, and EGI converts them into machine-executable workflows. The web-based interface integrates seamlessly with industry-standard design tools and software stacks.
Foundation EGI’s platform is already undergoing pilots at several unnamed Fortune 500 industrial companies. Early testing shows measurable reductions in design-to-manufacture cycles, fewer production errors, and stronger revenue outcomes from faster time-to-market. Its LLM is uniquely designed to interpret the highly specialised vocabulary of engineering, a critical advantage over general-purpose AI models.
Final thoughts
The startup isn’t just launching a product but defining a new category. As agentic AI becomes essential in solving real-world, high-stakes inefficiencies, Foundation EGI positions itself as the connective tissue between human ingenuity and machine precision in the industrial world.
With deep-tech roots, strong institutional backing, and a problem worth solving, Foundation EGI may well be the AI layer that finally brings engineering into the digital age.
“Engineering is primed for an AI revolution, but generic LLMs won’t cut it: they lack vital domain-specificity and are prone to inaccuracies,” said Foundation EGI co-founder and CEO, Mok Oh. ”Our first-of-its-kind technology is purpose-built for engineering and will supercharge every stage of product lifecycle management — starting with documentation. EGI transforms what is traditionally error-prone, manual and inconsistent into structured, sustained and accurate information and processes, so that engineering teams can not only achieve significant cost-savings but also be more nimble, productive and creative.”
Dennis Hodges, CIO at Inteva Products, a global automotive supplier of engineered components and systems, commented: “We have high expectations from Foundation’s EGI platform. It’s clear it will help us eliminate unnecessary costs and automate disorganised processes, bringing observability, auditability, transparency and business continuity to our engineering operations.”
Said Habib Haddad, founding Managing Partner of the E14 Fund, the MIT Media Lab affiliated venture fund: “The timing and market conditions are perfect for a company like Foundation EGI to solve what has long been a large and expensive challenge for America’s industrial manufacturing leaders. The combination of Foundation EGI’s vision, its world-class team, the widespread industry appetite for enterprise AI solutions, plus the uptick in manufacturing demand makes this a rich opportunity.”
Further, in a presentation today at TEDx MIT, co-founder Wojciech Matusik, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will elaborate on EGI’s potential. “Engineering general intelligence transforms natural language prompts into engineering-specific language using real-world atoms, spatial awareness and physics. It will unleash the creative might of a new generation of engineers. Expect leaps and bounds in agility, innovation and problem-solving.”
