Robotics AI startup Mecka has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with backing from Nvidia, Microsoft's M12 venture fund, Qualcomm Ventures, and Samsung.
Angel investors included DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, and former Tesla Optimus head Milan Kovac. Existing investors Kindred, Framework Ventures, and Neo also participated.
The company collects real-world human demonstrations to train robots and said in a Wednesday blog post that the fresh capital will be used to scale its data infrastructure, deepen its internal research lab, and build out commercial robot deployment.
"Fifty years ago, a robot needed five hours to cross a room. Last year, humanoids raced the hundred-meter dash in a Beijing stadium. The hardware kept improving. What it was waiting on was a way to learn," the firm said.
Robots don't lack intelligence, they lack experience
Mecka argues that robots lack the real-world experience needed to perform physical tasks, rather than intelligence, and is seeking to address that gap through human demonstration data.
"Robotics is the largest productivity unlock ahead of us, from folding laundry to building cities," Mecka said. "AI runs on data and compute, and data will be a trillion-dollar market too."
Mecka's bet is that real-world human demonstration is the key to scaling, an approach it said was tested through its EgoVerse human-to-robot transfer study with researchers at Georgia Tech, Stanford, UC San Diego, ETH Zürich, MIT, and Meta.
Mecka designs and manufactures its own multi-sensor hardware, running a global operation that records human demonstrations in homes and commercial environments. Its internal research lab develops computer vision and multimodal models that process the collected data for motion tracking, 3D reconstruction, and sensor alignment.
The firm said it supplies several of the top frontier robotics labs and multiple Mag 7 companies, surpassing $100 million in annualized revenue run rate in June and projecting a $300 million run rate by year-end.
"Soon, billions of helpful robots will work alongside us - in our homes, our hospitals, our factories, and one day, expanding humanity to the stars," Mecka said. "Every one of them will have learned from a human first."