Robotics startup Mecka AI has raised a $60 million Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, betting that the single biggest bottleneck holding back humanoid robots is not hardware — it is data.
The company announced the raise on October 7, 2026. New investors in the round include Nvidia, Microsoft's venture fund M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung, while existing backers Kindred Ventures, Framework Ventures and Neo continued their support.
The round also drew a high-profile group of angel investors: DoorDash founder and chief executive Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake chief executive Frank Slootman, and Milan Kovac, the former head of Tesla's Optimus humanoid program.
TechCrunch had previously reported that the Toronto-based startup was nearing a new round at a roughly $500 million valuation. Mecka says the new capital will scale its data infrastructure, deepen its internal research lab and build out commercial robot deployment.
The experience robots can't scrape
Mecka's pitch is simple: what robots lack is experience. No one ever wrote down how a hand grips, folds or pours, how hard to press, or when to let go.
"Motion, contact, force and geometry aren't on the internet. You can't scrape them, license them or buy them," the company wrote in its Series B announcement. That gap, Mecka argues, is the biggest bottleneck in robotics — and closing it could turn robot training data into a trillion-dollar market.
To capture that missing data, Mecka pays people to record themselves doing everyday tasks — making coffee, fixing cars, preparing food — while wearing body sensors and using smartphones.
It then processes the recordings through motion tracking, 3D reconstruction and sensor alignment pipelines, achieving what it says is sub-centimetre hand-pose accuracy on real-world data collected outside controlled environments.
The "egocentric" approach captures tasks from the performer's own point of view, a different route from teleoperation, in which a human remotely drives a robot to generate training data.
The funding race around robot data
Investors are piling into robot data at speed. Rival XDOF was reportedly in talks to raise a Series B round at a $1.2 billion valuation, and data platforms that began with large language models — including Scale AI and Micro1 — are expanding into robotics.
Mecka co-founder and chief executive Josh Gao told Fortune that the company projects a $100 million annual revenue run rate by the end of 2026, an aggressive target for a company founded in 2024.
Founders without a robotics background
None of Mecka's four co-founders comes from robotics. Gao and Mogen Cheng previously built a restaurant fintech startup in Canada, Jason Chong ran a crypto exchange that Coinbase later acquired, and Duy Nguyen handles operations.
The team spotted the physical-world data shortage early — and with Sequoia, Nvidia, Samsung and a former Tesla Optimus chief now backing the thesis, the market is signaling that the smart money agrees: robots' biggest problem may be that nobody has taught them how to touch.
By Hamza Faisal
