Altera is an applied research company building autonomous, collaborative, and socially intelligent AI agents, which it describes as digital humans with the capacity to learn, care, and grow alongside people. Rather than narrow task bots, Altera's agents are designed around social-emotional intelligence, with the ability to form relationships, cooperate, and behave in believably human ways over long horizons of interaction.
Gaming is Altera's first proving ground. The company built its initial product on GPT-4o: autonomous agents that can play Minecraft with a human player, behaving like a friend rather than a scripted bot. Because its agents execute actions as code, they can in principle play many games without bespoke customization. Altera drew wide attention when it ran what it called the first-ever simulation of more than 1,000 collaborating autonomous AI agents inside a Minecraft world, where the agents operated for hours or days without human intervention, forming a society, inventing roles, and interacting socially.
Altera was founded in 2023 by Robert Yang, a neuroscientist who left an assistant professorship at MIT, along with co-founders Andrew Ahn, Nico Christie, and Shuying Luo. The team's research roots in neuroscience and machine learning inform its focus on agents with memory, personality, and emotional reactivity. Minecraft and Roblox, where over a million people have interacted with Altera's agents, are framed as starting points before the technology expands to other games and digital experiences.
In May 2024 Altera announced an oversubscribed $9 million seed round co-led by Eric Schmidt's First Spark Ventures and Patron, a seed fund co-founded by Riot Games alumni, following a $2 million pre-seed from a16z SPEEDRUN and others. Additional backers include Alumni Ventures, Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, and other notable angels.