Vicarious, a startup trying to discover the rules that govern intelligence, has raised $15 million in a first round of funding from tech luminaries including Good Ventures, the fund created by Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The money isn’t to help commercialize its technology however, it’s basically R&D spending for a big tech undertaking.

Vicarious wants to build a series of algorithms that mimic the way the mammalian brain processes and applies information — in short it wants to build software that will grant computers intelligence. The first concrete product the Union City, Calif.-based startup aims to build is a human-like object recognition system, but this is something that co-founder and CTO Dileep George estimates is three to four years away. Apparently the long time frame is just fine with investors, and what makes Vicarious such an audacious bet.