Foundation models
for extreme-purpose
robotics.
Foundation models for firefighters, combat medics, search-and-rescue crews, and the soldiers who go down range. We are building toward the model layer for robots that work where every additional second of human presence is a tradeoff against death.
§ 01 — THE THESIS
Generalist physical intelligence for the people doing the hardest work in the world.
The hardest jobs in the world.
§ 02 — CAPABILITIES
What we’re building.
TARGET CAPABILITY SET · NOT DEPLOYED SYSTEMS
01—06
Whole-body control
Unified policies for locomotion, balance, and manipulation in unstructured environments — collapsed buildings, smoke, debris, contested ground.
Target: real-time closed-loop control
Cross-embodiment transfer
One backbone, many platforms. We’re designing for adapter-based transfer so a new chassis can be brought online in hours, not months.
Goal: minutes-scale adaptation
Vision-language-action
Operators give natural-language goals; the model grounds them in scene geometry and proprioceptive state. No bespoke programming per mission.
Multimodal: vision · language · proprio
Sim-to-real
Domain-randomized rollouts close the reality gap before a single real-world episode. Critical for environments that are too dangerous to train in directly.
Distributed simulation pipeline
Long-horizon planning
Hierarchical agents decompose multi-step missions — search, extraction, triage — into recoverable sub-goals with continuous human supervision.
Multi-step task decomposition
Safety & oversight
Any future deployed policy must ship behind a learned safety layer and a real-time human-override channel. Operators stay in command.
Human-in-the-loop by default
§ 03 — RESEARCH
Research that moves
off the page.
We work across the model, data, and evaluation layers required to turn generalist physical intelligence into reliable systems in the field.
Papers, artifacts, and honest release states.
Read the research record and see which supporting materials are public, pending, or still in development.
View publications 02 / PUBLIC CODECode that can be inspected, not a promise deck.
Public repositories, version status, and the infrastructure we can responsibly release.
Explore open source 03 / AUDITABLE EVALUATIONRules that expose their provenance.
Browse the 46-rule Colosseum registry by domain and grounding status, with the current validation limits in view.
Browse the registry§ 04 — OPERATORS
Who we build for.
§ 05 — TEAM
Founded by a researcher who has shipped in this field.
§ 06 — CAREERS
Join us.
Vertex is a founder-led, fully remote company building its first team across the United States. We work synchronously Monday through Thursday, with Friday reserved as a think day. We hire researchers and engineers with strong opinions and a track record of finishing things.