- Mecka AI raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia, with NVIDIA, M12, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
- It pays people to record everyday tasks and sells the motion data to robot developers.
- Mecka claims a $100 million run rate; its reported $500 million valuation is unconfirmed.
Mecka AI pays people to fold laundry, make coffee, and repair cars while wearing body sensors. The recordings are what it sells. The Toronto- and New York-based startup announced a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital to turn them into training data for humanoid robots.
NVIDIA, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung, and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, joined as new investors, while Kindred, Framework Ventures, and Neo returned. Angels include DoorDash founder and chief executive Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake chief executive Frank Slootman, and Milan Kovac, who used to head Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot programme.
The round takes Mecka’s total funding past $120 million, counting the $60 million Series A led by Framework Ventures, disclosed in June, and an $8 million seed round listed by Dealroom. Mecka’s announcement gives no valuation. TechCrunch reported, citing two people with knowledge of the deal, that Sequoia’s round values the company at about $500 million. Sequoia declined to comment.
Paying humans to teach machines
Mecka was co-founded by Josh Gao, chief executive, Jason Chong, chief technology officer, Mogen Cheng, and Duy Nguyen. None has credentials from a leading AI lab, Fortune noted. Gao and Cheng sold a restaurant payments startup in 2023. Chong joined Coinbase after it bought his crypto startup.
Mecka, which is only a couple of years old, pays people to record everyday tasks with smartphones, body sensors, and capture hardware it designs and manufactures. An in-house lab turns the footage into structured data covering motion tracking, 3D reconstruction, and sensor alignment. Mecka claims hand-pose tracking accurate to within a centimetre of data recorded outside the lab.
The approach breaks with teleoperation, where people remotely control a robot to generate data. Mecka also works as a robot integrator: it installs hardware, captures data on site, retrains models on it, and runs the system afterwards.
The company says it supplies several leading robotics labs and multiple Magnificent Seven companies, the group of the biggest US tech stocks, but it has not named customers.
The numbers that need a second look
Mecka says it passed $100 million in run-rate revenue in June, only a few months into operations, and projects $300 million by the end of the year. A run rate annualises recent sales.
If the reported $500 million valuation holds, Mecka is priced at about five times its claimed run rate. TechCrunch reports that XDOF, which emerged from stealth on June 17 with a $70 million Series A from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, and WndrCo, is in late-stage talks for a Series B at about $1.2 billion, led by 8VC, on annualised revenue approaching $50 million. That would be more than 24 times.
Forbes reports that Micro1 raised more than $100 million at $4 billion, about eight times the $500 million run rate TechCrunch reported for it in August. The metrics differ and none of the three valuations is confirmed, so treat the comparison as a rough guide.
Whether that lower multiple is a bargain or a warning depends on something the numbers cannot show: whether data recorded from human bodies teaches robots as well as data recorded from robots themselves. XDOF collects both, pairing remote robot operation with human collectors who wear sensors.
A crowded race for physical AI data
Others are chasing the same shortage from different angles. Encord, which raised a $60 million Series C led by Wellington Management, sells software to manage and label such data rather than collect it. It has raised $110 million in total and said revenue from physical AI customers grew tenfold in the previous 12 months. Micro1 started as an AI recruiting tool, and its founder, Ali Ansari, said on X that it now pays $50 to $90 an hour for people to annotate videos of robots at work, Forbes reported.
The capital behind the race is large. Humanoid robot startups raised $8.6 billion by late July, 1.8 times all of 2025, according to Dealroom data cited in aTech Funding News ranking of the top 10 humanoid startups. NVIDIA, which also backed NEURA Robotics’ $1.4 billion Series C in June, has now backed both a robot maker and a data supplier. Sequoia already backs Physical Intelligence, a startup that builds AI models for robots and,TFN reported in March, was in talks to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.
Mecka says the money will go to scaling its data infrastructure, deepening its research lab, and expanding commercial robot deployments. It is hiring in research, hardware, and operations. It had about 40 employees in June, according to Fortune, and has not published a hiring target.
The test for Mecka is the one its announcement leaves open. It has to show that data recorded from humans measurably improves robots, and that customers it has not yet named will keep paying for it. Until it does, the $100 million run rate is a claim to watch, not a figure to build on.
