Mecka, which pays people to record everyday tasks in body sensors to train humanoid robots, raises $60M led by Sequoia
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 7, 2026 TechCrunch reported that Mecka AI, founded in 2024, raised a $60M Series B at a $500M valuation, led by Sequoia with Nvidia and Microsoft’s M12.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 1 of 5
- Last verified
- 9 October 2026
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Key facts
- Series B: $60M at a $500M valuation; led by Sequoia, with Nvidia, M12 (Microsoft) and others (TechCrunch)
- Method: paid contributors wear body sensors and smartphones while doing everyday activities
- Competitors named: XDOF (in Series B talks at $1.2B), plus Scale AI and Micro1 expanding from LLM data into robotics
What happened
Mecka AI raised $60 million to scale its collection of human-motion data. Robot makers have little real-world data compared with the text used to train LLMs, and Mecka pays people to record their ordinary physical work to fill that gap.
Why it matters
Training data is the main bottleneck for general-purpose robot policies. Firms that supply it at scale now draw the same top-tier backers that funded LLM data vendors.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 press
Press
- TechCrunch: Robot data startup Mecka AI nabs $60M from Sequoiatechcrunch.com, press
Changes
- Filed