Poetiq’s $45.8 million seed round, announced Wednesday, comes with proof that six former Google DeepMind researchers have cracked a fundamental barrier in AI reasoning—achieving 75% accuracy on the notoriously difficult ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, a 16-percentage-point leap beyond previous state-of-the-art.

The achievement matters now because enterprises are drowning in a $30-40 billion AI investment crisis. An MIT study published in August 2025 found that 95% of organizations are “getting zero return” on their GenAI deployments, with most failures traced to LLMs’ inability to handle real-world reasoning tasks that require more than pattern matching.