Auki Labs provides the spatial infrastructure necessary for AI agents to operate outside of digital sandboxes. Most current agents are limited to manipulating data or making API calls; Auki's posemesh protocol gives them the ability to understand and navigate physical 3D spaces. This is a critical development for the "Spatial AI" category, where agents need to direct robots or assist humans in physical environments like retail stores, hospitals, or warehouses.
By creating a decentralized and privacy-preserving coordinate system, Auki allows agent developers to build applications that interact with the real world without the overhead or privacy risks of centralized mapping services. They are championing a vision of the "Real World Web" where physical locations and objects are as indexed and searchable as digital data, making them an essential infrastructure provider for the emerging robotics and embodied AI ecosystem.
Auki Labs is building a technical layer intended to bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical geometry. While large language models and software agents have become increasingly capable in virtual environments, their ability to interact with the physical world remains constrained by a lack of shared spatial context. Most existing solutions for spatial positioning rely on centralized "visual positioning systems" that require constant data transmission to a single provider. Auki Labs is challenging this model with the posemesh, a decentralized protocol for collaborative machine perception.
Based in Hong Kong and founded in 2019 by Nils Pihl, the company focuses on giving machines an external sense of space. The core problem they address is that for two robots to collaborate or for an AI agent to guide a human through a warehouse, they must agree on their precise coordinates. The posemesh enables this through a peer-to-peer approach where devices calculate their position relative to one another and local anchors, rather than checking against a global master map controlled by a big tech incumbent.
The company is a significant player in the DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) sector. Their infrastructure relies on Hagall relay servers, which provide the low-latency networking required for real-time spatial computing. By decentralizing these relays, Auki allows for spatial awareness that does not sacrifice user privacy. Unlike centralized systems that might reconstruct a 3D model of a user's home or office on a distant server, the posemesh protocol is designed to facilitate positioning while keeping raw sensor data local to the devices involved.
This approach has practical implications for industries like retail and industrial automation. In a retail setting, Auki helps companies like Reitan and FairPrice create indoor navigation systems where AI assistants can guide shoppers to specific shelf locations. In industrial contexts, it allows fleets of robots to move and manipulate objects with a shared understanding of their surroundings. The system is designed to scale to the next generation of spatial computing hardware, including AR glasses and autonomous mobile robots.
Nils Pihl, who has a background in behavioral psychology and technology, has steered the company toward a mission of increasing "intercognitive capacity." This refers to the ability of humans and AI to solve problems collaboratively. By making the world machine-readable, Auki is essentially building a search engine for physical objects. If an AI agent can query the posemesh to find the exact location of a tool in a factory or a product in a store, it can execute physical tasks that were previously impossible for purely digital agents.
Backed by investors such as Kenetic Capital, Animoca Brands, and Tribe Capital, Auki Labs is building a protocol that integrates with the Base blockchain to handle decentralized coordination and incentives. As spatial computing becomes a more prominent part of the technology stack, the distinction between decentralized protocols like the posemesh and centralized mapping services will likely become a central debate in how robots and AI navigate our private and public spaces.
A decentralized spatial computing protocol for collaborative machine perception.
Auki Labs is hiring