Backing the machines that are learning to act.
Talon Capital Partners backs founders building applied AI. We invest with deep conviction in the companies carrying intelligence into the physical world — robotics and autonomy, defense, and the reinvention of how things are made — and in the teams building domain-specific AI to solve a single hard problem.
The thesis
Software learned to think this decade. The next one is about teaching it to move.
For twenty years the frontier of AI lived on a screen — text, images, predictions. That frontier has now crossed into the physical world. Foundation models are learning control. Perception has gotten cheap and reliable. Actuators, batteries, and compute have quietly crossed the thresholds that make autonomy economical.
We call this Applied AI: intelligence deployed against real work — factories, supply lines, the field. And at its sharpest edge sit the machines themselves — robots and autonomous systems, defense platforms, and the plants remaking how things are built — where a model's decisions carry weight, torque, and consequence.
Talon backs the founders who are early to this, technical to the core, and building the unglamorous infrastructure of an automated economy. We move with conviction, write real first checks, and stay close.
Where we invest
Robotics & Autonomy
General-purpose robots and the manipulation, mobility, and control stacks that make them useful in the real world.
Embodied AI & Control
Foundation models for action — policies, world models, and sim-to-real pipelines that turn perception into competent behavior.
Robotics Training Data
Parsing, verifying, and selling the demonstration and sensor data that teaches robots to act — the fuel of embodied AI.
Defense & Autonomous Systems
Drones, uncrewed platforms, and the software giving democracies a durable technological edge.
Advanced Manufacturing
AI rethinking how physical things get made — materials and metals, process control, and the modern factory floor.
Domain-Specific Harnesses
AI aimed at one hard problem at a time — purpose-built systems that wrap models, data, and evaluation around a single real-world workflow.
Portfolio
The partners
Shwetark Patel
Shwetark is an olympiad winner who studied at MIT before building a crypto trading firm from the ground up to many billions in trading volume.
He started Talon to back the next generation of founders bringing AI into the physical world. Having built a technical company from scratch himself, he knows what the early days ask of a team — so he invests early and works to help every company he backs.
If you're building AI into the physical world, we want to see it.
Pre-seed and seed founders in applied AI and robotics — send us what you're building. We read everything, and we move quickly.
hello@taloncapitalpartners.com →