Mecka AI Nears $500M Valuation in Sequoia-Led Round — SkimNews
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- Mecka AI is nearing a Sequoia Capital-led funding round at a valuation of approximately $500 million, according to two people familiar with the deal.
- The new round comes only three months after Mecka announced a $60 million raise led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.
- The deal's exact size and terms are not yet final and could still change; Mecka declined to comment and Sequoia declined to comment.
- Mecka AI was co-founded in 2024 by four entrepreneurs — Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen — none of whom have robotics backgrounds, yet they identified the scarcity of real-world physical data as the core bottleneck for training general-purpose robots.
- The startup pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks like making coffee or fixing cars using body sensors and smartphones, aiming to do for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor, and Surge did for large language models.
- Co-founder Josh Gao told Fortune in early June that Mecka was projecting a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026.
- Other startups chasing robot-training data include XDOF, reportedly nearing a round at a $1.2 billion valuation, alongside human-data platforms expanding from LLMs such as Scale AI and Micro1.
Why it matters: A roughly 8x valuation jump in three months — from a $60M round led by Framework Ventures to a ~$500M Sequoia-led deal — puts Mecka AI alongside XDOF ($1.2B) in a rapidly heating market for human-motion data, the bottleneck its founders say is holding back general-purpose humanoid robots.
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