Mecka lands $60M Series B from Sequoia for robot motion data
TL;DR
- Mecka crossed $100M annualized run rate in June and targets $300M by year-end with fewer than 60 employees.
- All four founders came from fintech and crypto with no robotics background, which the CEO credits for enabling a simpler egocentric capture approach over traditional teleoperation.
- Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and M12 each co-invested as strategics treating Mecka's EgoVerse dataset as a component of their own robotics hardware stacks.
Mecka, a two-year-old Toronto startup that pays people to wear body sensors while performing routine tasks like preparing beverages or repairing vehicles, has raised a $60 million Series B at a $500 million valuation. Sequoia Capital led the round, TechCrunch reports, with new money from Nvidia, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung and Microsoft's M12.
The pitch, in the company's own words from its Series B announcement: "Motion, contact, force and geometry aren't on the internet. You can't scrape them, license them or buy them." Mecka does not build robots. It plugs into other people's hardware and sells the resulting human-demonstration data to humanoid trainers. Its EgoVerse dataset currently contains 1,362 hours of recorded demonstrations across 80,000 episodes and 2,087 unique demonstrators.
Angel checks came from DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, and Milan Kovac, who previously ran Tesla's Optimus humanoid program. TechCrunch places Mecka alongside a crop of training-data startups chasing robotics money: XDOF in Series B talks at a reported $1.2 billion valuation, Micro1 at $500 million, plus Scale AI, Mercor and Surge.
Customers are described only as "several of the top frontier robotics labs and multiple Mag 7 companies." No names. It is the second robotics-sector funding round we have tracked this week, after Parallel Systems' $100M Series C for autonomous freight rail on the same day.
What others are reporting
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Dealroom Read →
Frames the round within venture ecosystem benchmarks, highlighting Mecka's $100M+ run rate at sub-60 headcount as exceptional for capital-intensive robotics infrastructure.
Tripling run-rate from above $100 million to $300 million in six months demands serious momentum.
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Tech Funding News Read →
Questions the $100M run-rate claim by comparing Mecka's valuation multiple to XDOF and Micro1, and challenges whether human motion data structurally outperforms robot-generated data.
Mecka says it passed $100 million in run-rate revenue in June, only a few months into operations, and projects $300 million by the end of the year.
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Humanoids Daily Read →
Grounds Mecka's claims in EgoVerse consortium research showing data volume alone does not guarantee better robot policy performance; flags Figure Index as a competing internal approach.
More human data generally improved robot policy performance, while emphasizing that effective scaling depends on matching the data to the robot-learning objective.
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Inside AI News Read →
Supplies the CEO quote, notes all four founders lack robotics backgrounds, and details vertical expansion plans from household and automotive into healthcare and manufacturing.
We believe the key to unlocking general-purpose robotics is data that reflects how humans actually move and interact with the world.
Originally reported by techcrunch.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Mecka Lands $60M Series B From Sequoia, Nvidia, Samsung and M12 to Scale Humanoid Motion Data