Robotics Startup Eka Valued at $1.45 Billion on Physical AI Model
By Tim Fernholz · · TexaHub · Robotics, Artificial Intelligence
Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime. The company pairs a force-sensitive gripper with a vision-force-action model trained in simulation.
Funding and founders
Eka was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime led the round, and a16z general partner Raghu Raghuram predicted superhuman performance in many dexterous manipulation tasks within months. [1]
Technology
The system uses a vision-force-action model rather than a vision-language-action model, trained with a physics simulator and reinforcement learning that the company says can generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes. [1]
The gripper hardware costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, against a goal of 20 million, the standard for industrial arms. [1]
Performance claims
Eka says its robot picks about 1,500 objects of up to 1 kilogram per hour, against about 600 for a human, with a success rate above 95 percent. [1]
Kris Hauser of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cited a 'wow factor' but said running for a year on real assembly lines and generalising beyond pick-and-place remain open challenges. The company is running confidential pilots in pick-and-place and wire manipulation. [1]
Sources
[1] Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving — TechCrunch