Mecka's $60m round puts the chipmakers into robot training data

Sequoia leads, but the signal is the cap table: Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and Microsoft are buying into the data robots train on.

Mecka, a New York startup that records people doing everyday tasks with wearable sensors and cameras and sells the result as robot-training data, has raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia. Valuation: Undisclosed.^[1]

Look at who joined. The new investors are Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung: the companies that sell the chips, cloud and devices that robot models run on. Existing backers Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo followed on.^[1] Framework also led this week's $50 million Series A in warehouse-robot maker Ultra, so one fund now sits on both the data supply and a deployed fleet.^[2]

Mecka says its annualised run rate passed $100 million in June and will reach $300 million by year-end. Both figures are company-reported and unverified, and a run rate is not revenue.^[1] Customers are not named and volumes are not disclosed. Mecka has also not published independent evidence that its data improves robot performance.

The money pays for more capture equipment, a bigger research lab and a new robot-integration service that adapts robots using data from the customer's own operations.^[1] That service puts Mecka inside the deployment and in the customer's operating budget, not just on a dataset licence.