Mecka AI raises $60M Series B led by Sequoia — SkimNews
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- Mecka AI raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia, with Nvidia and Microsoft venture fund M12 participating alongside other investors, per prior TechCrunch reporting the round was at a $500 million valuation.
- Mecka pays people to record themselves performing tasks like making coffee or fixing cars while wearing body sensors and using smartphones, collecting the human motion data needed to train humanoid and other robots.
- Mecka is positioning itself as the Scale AI or Mercor of robotics, applying the human-data-labeling playbook those companies used for large language models to the robotics domain instead.
- Competitor XDOF was in talks to raise a Series B at a $1.2 billion valuation, signaling that real-world data collection for robot training is drawing increasingly large rounds from investors.
- Scale AI and Micro1, which started as LLM-focused human-data platforms, are now expanding into robotics, putting Mecka into a fast-crowding field almost as soon as it launched in 2024.
Why it matters: A two-year-old startup just raised a $60M round to become the Scale AI of robot training, with Nvidia and Microsoft — two of the biggest buyers of robotics data — taking investor seats. The $1.2B valuation chatter for rival XDOF shows the data-pickup layer is already becoming a winner-take-most market, and the entry of LLM-era giants Scale AI and Micro1 into robotics means Mecka is racing well-capitalized incumbents for the same contracts.
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