Mecka lands $60M Series B from Sequoia for robot motion data

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.