Photo: Peter Kvarnström / Göteborg & Co
Press release 14th October 2026
NVIDIA GTC 2026 and Barcelona SCEWC26
Across the Nordics, organizations are moving from software AI to Physical AI: training and testing real-world systems in high-fidelity digital twins before they ever touch the physical world. Younite AI is already putting this into practice on city streets and on the factory floor.
“This technology opens a lot of doors for diverse use cases,” says Afa Heikkinen, CEO at Younite AI. “The same foundation that trains robots and autonomous vehicles can help cities prepare for emergency situations, support defense readiness, or optimize production in industry.”
In Gothenburg, Sweden, Younite is building a digital twin experience on NVIDIA Omniverse to lower thresholds and make events more accessible. As part of the EU's Citiverse initiative, the strategy is to build a reusable and smart foundation that other European cities can adopt in a simple and resource-effective way. Younite is already working on how the same foundation can be utilized in other use cases like crowd management and emergency response, which are the next use cases on the roadmap.
The same approach is already at work in industry. Younite has built NVIDIA Isaac Lab digital twin training environments for two large Nordic manufacturing companies, where humanoid robots are trained through reinforcement learning on realistic digital twins before any work happens in the real world. This builds a foundation for a future, where intelligent robots can work safely alongside heavy machinery in the same space, and flexibly enhance manufacturing processes.
"Whether it's a city or a piece of industrial equipment, the pattern is the same: build the digital twin connected to real world data – real to sim – train and prove the system safely in simulation, and only then move it back into the real world – sim to real. That's what Physical AI actually means in practice”, says Afa Heikkinen.
Younite will be at NVIDIA GTC Berlin (20th to 22nd October) and Smart City Expo in Barcelona (3rd to 5th November, Hall 3, Stand D71), where it will share more on how the same foundation is being extended across smart cities and industry.
About Younite
Younite integrates data, AI, and digital twins to create insight for humans and a training ground for AI. The company's premise is that real value appears where these come together: a digital twin built on real spatial data gives AI something true to reason over, and AI turns that live picture into insight and action for a city, a port, or a factory floor. Founded in 2017, Younite has offices in Helsinki, Oulu, and New York.
