Embedd, a Ukraine-founded start-up based in London that builds software infrastructure for physical AI, has raised £2m in pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp. The company is already working with several semiconductor firms and recently partnered with Microchip Technology.
The round was also backed by Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, U.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic and Roosh Ventures.
Nearly £14bn has been invested in robotics and physical AI so far this year, covering areas from cars to medical devices. Intelligent machines still face a common obstacle: the software must communicate reliably with dozens of different chips that do not share a common language.
Embedd automates that layer. Rather than engineers reading thousands of pages of documentation and writing code by hand, the platform creates a digital twin of the hardware. Its AI agents then use that context to handle the integration and generate the code that makes each chip usable by the software above it.
The company says customers have delivered production-ready software for chips up to six times faster since it launched commercially in April 2026. It has signed contracts with multiple semiconductor companies. At Microchip Technology, Embedd is enabling Zephyr support.
Michael Lazarenko, co-founder and CEO of Embedd, said: “The next wave of AI will power factories, vehicles, robots and critical infrastructure, but today, every change in hardware creates huge complexity for software teams and that friction is already massively slowing innovation. We built Embedd to address exactly that, and we’re thrilled to have the backing of Seedcamp as we scale.”
Embedd was founded by Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs Michael Lazarenko, Maxim Gorinov and Valentin Gololobov after their previous hardware company was hit by chip shortages during Covid and later disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Forced to repeatedly rewrite software for newly sourced components, the founders identified a bottleneck they expected to grow as AI moved into the physical world.
Rodger Richey, Vice President of Development Systems and Academic Programs at Microchip Technology, said: “The competitive question in embedded is no longer whose silicon is fastest, it’s whose silicon is easiest to build on. Our work with Embedd is about meeting developers inside the software ecosystems they’ve already committed to, rather than asking them to come to ours.”
In September 2025 Embedd released a free cross-vendor Graphical MCU Configurator that uses AI to organise data on more than 1,400 MCU families from major manufacturers. The tool allows engineers to configure devices visually, generate device trees and port setups across vendors, addressing the same hardware-software friction that the current funding round aims to scale further for physical AI applications.
Embedd will use the funding to continue developing its platform and expand its work with semiconductor companies.
Michael Lazarenko added: “The promise of physical AI is enormous, but today’s hardware fragmentation is slowing innovation. This funding enables us to expand our platform and help more semiconductor companies bring their devices into emerging software ecosystems”
Image source: LinkedIn
