Veris AI Raises $8.5M to Bring "AI Gyms" to Life

Veris AI is building for a critical layer of the stack: training infrastructure. The New York-based startup, which recently emerged from stealth with an $8.5 million seed round led by Decibel Ventures and Acrew Capital, believes the barrier to enterprise AI is the environments in which agents are trained.

Veris AI provides high-fidelity simulation environments where AI agents can learn, practice, and improve, much like self-driving cars tested in virtual cities before hitting the road. Veris is expecting these agents, trained not with static prompts but through interactive experience, to form the backbone of enterprise automation in the coming years. “We started Veris after observing that the traditional ways we train machine learning models just don’t work for AI agents,” said Mehdi Jamei, Veris AI’s co-founder and CEO. “Similar to how self-driving cars needed simulated cities to become production-ready, AI agents need real experience.”

Jamei brings both technical depth and enterprise AI experience to the table, having led agentic AI initiatives at System and Workmate. His co-founder and CTO, Andi Partovi, previously worked as a Solutions Architect at Google and co-founded KeyLead Health. Together, they combine academic credentials: a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and brain-computer interfaces respectively, with years of building applied AI systems for business use.

“As founders, Mehdi and Andi have a rare combination of academic, technical and enterprise customer experience that makes them well-positioned to deliver on this new paradigm,” said Alessio Fanelli, Partner and CTO at Decibel Ventures. “We’ve been looking to make an investment in this space for quite some time and Veris is the only platform we found that is building the environment layer that enterprise AI has been missing.”