Startup aims to provide the real-world training data required to deploy robots.
Toronto- and New York City-based Mecka AI has raised a $60-million USD ($86-million CAD) Series B round led by Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital.
This financing was first reported by Bloomberg, which indicated that US chip giants Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Microsoft’s M12 also participated. Mecka confirmed the round to BetaKit in an email.
Mecka aims to build “the data and deployment layer” for physical AI by providing real-world data to train robots.
The two-year-old startup aims to build “the data and deployment layer” for physical AI, providing real-world data sourced from body sensors and iPhones to train humanoids and other types of robots.
Demand for this type of data—which, unlike the text, images, and video required to train large language models, cannot be scraped from the internet—is booming.
TechCrunch reported last month that Mecka was raising a new Sequoia-led round at a valuation of about $500 million.
The new funding comes months after Mecka acquired small, bootstrapped Vancouver-based startup Docula and announced $60 million USD in Series A financing.
Mecka secured that amount across an initial $25-million USD Series A round from last November and a $35-million extension that closed over the summer, financed by Framework Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, and others.
Mecka is betting that video captured from a first-person human perspective will help robots learn faster and scale more efficiently. The company collects this data from home settings, culinary work, chemistry labs, task platforms, metal fabrication, and leather shops, and converts it into training-ready data for multiple frontier robotics labs and Big Tech firms.
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While Mecka is domiciled in the US, three of its four co-founders are Canadian, and the vast majority of its staff are in Toronto.
AI claimed nearly half of all venture dollars invested in Canada last year, and global interest in robotics, humanoid makers, and firms building embodied AI is heating up.
The Canadian Robotics Council has clocked “a rapid increase” in the number of robotics startups being launched, both at home and abroad. Vancouver’s A&K Robotics and NorBot, Winnipeg’s TetraGen Robotics, and Montréal-based Mecademic are among the other startups that have benefitted from this surge.
Feature image courtesy Mecka.