Metacognition

Metacognition (legally Metacognition Pty Ltd) is an Australian deep-tech company building what it describes as an operating system for AI agents and robots - software that sits underneath large language models and governs how they interact with machinery and other systems. Its stated mission is to solve persistent memory and lifelong reasoning in always-on multi-agent systems, on the argument that current LLM architectures confound language with knowledge and so encode the errors of the internet immutably in their weights. The commercial aim is to let non-experts train robot hardware for useful tasks through plain verbal instruction and feedback, with agents that remember instructions and improve as they work. The company is initially targeting existing industrial systems and has built simulations in which an operator directs an open-cut mine or manages an electricity grid by speaking to it. It was co-founded in 2026 by Anton van den Hengel, chief scientist and founding director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, with Stephen Gould, an ANU professor who was a principal research scientist on Amazon's Just Walk Out and co-founded Sensory Networks, and Paul Dalby, a research and innovation strategist. It raised a $10M seed led by the CSIRO-backed deep tech investor Main Sequence, announced 2026-09-09, and its team of eight is hiring more AI researchers.