XDOF in $1.2B Series B Talks Led by 8VC — SkimNews
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- XDOF is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at roughly $1.2 billion led by 8VC, less than three months after emerging from stealth, according to people with knowledge of the deal
- XDOF had not planned to raise again so soon after its $70 million Series A in June (Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, Spark Capital), as VCs approached the company after annualized revenue approached $50 million
- Co-founders Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO), both UC Berkeley researchers, launched the company in 2024 after building GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system for robotic arms whose paper became influential in robotics
- XDOF acts as an outsourced data-supply chain for physical robotics — combining remote robot teleoperation with human collectors wearing body sensors to record tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes
- XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley's AI Research lab to release ABC, which it calls the largest collection of high-quality robot training data ever assembled
- XDOF already works with 20 customers including several frontier AI labs, and plans to hire and train data collection teams worldwide, including teleoperators and egocentric body-sensor operators
- Other real-world robot data players named in coverage include Mecka AI, with Scale AI and Micro1 expanding from LLM data into physical robotics
Why it matters: XDOF's jump from a $70M Series A to $1.2B talks in roughly three months — driven by annualized revenue near $50M — signals that physical robotics has hit the same data-infrastructure bottleneck that Scale AI and Mercor solved for LLMs, and frontier AI labs are now paying robot-native data vendors to fill it. Investors are pricing the company as the category leader before the round even closes, raising the stakes for competitors like Mecka AI and Scale AI's robotics expansion.
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