XDOF, just three months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation — SkimNews
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- XDOF is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a ~$1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, less than three months after emerging from stealth
- Co-founders Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO), UC Berkeley researchers, launched XDOF in 2024 after building GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that became an influential robotics paper
- XDOF raised a $70 million Series A in June with Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital — the company wasn't planning to raise again so soon, but annualized revenue approaching $50 million drew VCs to its door
- Investors describe XDOF as the Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies can't easily build in-house
- 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, captured via remote teleoperators and egocentric operators wearing body sensors
- The startup already works with 20 customers including several frontier AI labs and plans to hire data-collector teams worldwide; competitors include Mecka AI, Scale AI, and Micro1
Why it matters: Reaching a ~$1.2 billion valuation with annualized revenue approaching $50 million — for a company founded in 2024 and out of stealth just three months ago — shows how aggressively investors are pricing physical-AI data infrastructure. The Scale AI-style comparison underscores the bet that robotics will demand its own massive, outsourced data supply chain, not just internet-scraped corpora.
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