Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Mecka AI, a startup that collects and analyzes quality question information to bid humanoid robots and different robotics, is nearing a caller circular led by Sequoia Capital astatine a valuation of astir $500 million, according to 2 radical with cognition of the deal.

The caller financing comes conscionable 3 months aft Mecka announced that it raised $60 cardinal successful a circular led by Framework Ventures that included information from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.

TechCrunch has not learned the precise size of the caller round. The presumption of the woody are not last and could inactive change.

Mecka AI didn’t respond to a petition for comment. Sequoia declined to comment.

Mecka AI was co-founded successful 2024 by 4 entrepreneurs, including Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who antecedently built a edifice fintech startup, and Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase aft it acquired his crypto exchange. Duy Nguyen, the lone non-Canadian connected the team, focuses connected operations astatine Mecka.

The 4 co-founders don’t person backgrounds successful robotics. But they did admit that determination was a dearth of physical-world information and realized that capturing real-world interactions was the superior bottleneck holding backmost general-purpose robots, including humanoids.

Mecka, which derives its sanction from “mecha,” a fictional elephantine robot controlled by humans, acceptable retired to bash for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, and different quality information companies person done for LLMs. The startup pays radical to grounds themselves performing mundane tasks — similar making java oregon fixing cars — utilizing assemblage sensors and smartphones.

As of aboriginal June, Mecka was projecting that it would extremity 2026 astatine an yearly tally complaint of $100 million, Gao told Fortune erstwhile the startup announced its erstwhile fundraise.

While Mecka AI hasn’t publically disclosed its lawsuit list, galore robotics companies and AI labs trust connected real-world information captured done this “egocentric” approach, alongside different carnal information postulation methods similar teleoperation, to physique their models.

Other startups collecting real-world information for robot grooming see XDOF, which TechCrunch reported past week was nearing a caller circular astatine a $1.2 cardinal valuation, arsenic good arsenic human-data platforms expanding beyond LLMs, specified as Scale AI and Micro1.