Mecka, a robotics-data startup with most of its staff in Toronto, has raised US$60 million, or C$86 million, to expand the infrastructure and research behind its robot-training business, BetaKit reported.
Silicon Valley investment firm Sequoia Capital led the Series B financing, which Mecka announced Wednesday. The company operates from Toronto and New York City, and three of its four co-founders are Canadian, although the business is domiciled in the United States.
The two-year-old startup supplies real-world data used to train humanoid robots and other kinds of robots. It said the new money will support larger-scale data infrastructure, further development of its internal research lab and expansion of its commercial robot deployment capabilities.
New backers in the round included Nvidia, Samsung and the corporate venture capital arms of Microsoft and Qualcomm. Existing investors Kindred Ventures, Framework Ventures and Neo also participated.
Individual investors included DoorDash co-founder and chief executive Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake chief executive Frank Slootman, and Milan Kovac, the former head of Tesla Optimus.
Capturing human tasks to train robots
Mecka collects information through body sensors and iPhones, including video recorded from a person's point of view. Its approach rests on the idea that observing human tasks this way can help robots learn faster and be deployed more efficiently.
The company's collection settings include homes, culinary workplaces, chemistry labs, task platforms, metal fabrication operations and leather shops. It processes those recordings into data that robotics research labs and large technology companies can use for training.
Mecka has developed sensor-equipped hardware to gather the material, along with computer vision and multimodal models to process it. According to BetaKit, demand is growing for this kind of physical-world training data, which cannot simply be gathered from the internet.
The company said it exceeded a US$100-million run-rate in June and expects that figure to reach US$300 million by the end of the year.
Funding follows Vancouver acquisition
The latest investment follows Mecka's acquisition of Docula, a small, bootstrapped Vancouver startup, and its announcement of US$60 million in Series A funding.
That earlier financing consisted of an initial US$25-million round last November and a US$35-million extension that closed over the summer. Its backers included Framework, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred.
TechCrunch reported last month that Mecka was seeking a new Sequoia-led round at a valuation of about US$500 million. That figure was reported during fundraising, rather than identified as a confirmed valuation in the financing announcement.
