Drift
"Simulation based evaluations for 10x faster robot deployments"
San Francisco startup founded 2025 whose Drift AI agent turns natural-language prompts into ROS 2 robot simulations in MuJoCo and Gazebo for robot evaluation.
Drift is the product brand of Ramankind Inc., a San Francisco-based startup that builds a simulation-based evaluation platform for robotics teams. The platform is grounded in physics simulation, covers the full robotics stack, and is positioned on the claim that simulation-based evaluation makes robot deployment 10x faster. Its core tool is an AI agent for robotics engineering that takes natural-language prompts and generates and runs robot simulation workspaces.
The Drift agent runs locally as an interactive command-line interface, and project files stay on the user's machine. It supports MuJoCo and Gazebo Harmonic natively, with NVIDIA Isaac Sim support listed as coming soon on the website and documented as requiring an NVIDIA RTX GPU with 16 GB of GPU memory for interactive mode. The agent integrates with ROS 2 (ROS 1 is not supported) and works with the URDF, SDF, MJCF and USD robot description formats. The primary supported platform is x86_64 (amd64) Linux. Apple Silicon machines need an x86_64 Ubuntu virtual machine, and Raspberry Pi is not supported. The product is in active beta.
The platform's listed capabilities include prompt-to-simulation generation, agentic task planning and execution, physics-grounded verification of results, ROS-native robot control, autonomous debugging and recovery, scenario-variation testing, and pipelines for collecting synthetic data. Policy training support is listed as coming soon. The company targets robotics OEMs and research teams that want to test, train and evaluate robot behavior in virtual environments before deploying on hardware. Release binaries are distributed through a public GitHub repository (godrift-ai/drift-releases), and documentation is hosted at docs.godrift.ai. The company also runs a Discord community for users.
Drift says engineers from more than 200 institutes and companies use the tool. Its website names Northeastern University, Georgia Tech, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University and UC San Diego among them. Its backer Antler reports users in 30 countries, including research labs at Stanford and MIT.
Drift was founded in July 2025 by Sanjil Jain and Nikhil Kumar. Both studied electronic engineering and were members of robotics clubs in college. Kumar is a graduate of an Indian Institute of Technology and previously worked at Qualcomm, and Jain previously worked at a B2B SaaS company in India. Before Drift, the two founders built benny, an AI search platform for e-commerce in India that reached more than 40,000 users and was acquired after two years. They validated the Drift concept through Antler's program in Singapore and then relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area.
The company is backed by Antler. Its legal entity is Ramankind Inc., at 2261 Market Street, San Francisco, California.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Drift
Local CLI AI agent that generates, runs and debugs ROS 2 robot simulations from natural-language prompts.
Drift Simulation-Based Evaluation Platform
Physics-grounded scenario-variation testing and synthetic data collection for evaluating robot stacks before deployment.
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Contact Drift
WEBSITE
https://www.godrift.ai/HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2025
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
