Eka Robotics Valued at $1.45B After $150M Series A for Force-Sensing Robot Model

Eka Robotics has raised a $150 million Series A round at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime, on the strength of a manipulation system that combines a force-sensitive gripper with a new deep-learning approach.

The startup was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, who met in graduate school at UC Berkeley. Their model is a vision-force-action system rather than the vision-language-action type more common in the field, built around the idea that force, not sight, solves the final millimeter of a grasp.

The robot can pick up roughly 1,500 objects weighing up to 1 kg per hour, against about 600 for a human, and Eka says it succeeds more than 95% of the time. It handles a raspberry without crushing it - a demo that left one roboticist at a frontier lab describing the experience as emotional. University of Illinois professor Kris Hauser said the robot adapted to many objects without retraining and showed a "creepy humanness" in retrying after failure.

a16z general partner Raghu Raguram said the system already exceeds superhuman performance on some tasks and expects that to extend to many dexterous manipulation tasks within months. Eka is running undisclosed industrial pilots in pick-and-place and wire handling. Agrawal said the gripper costs under $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, with a goal of reaching the 20 million cycles typical of industrial arms.

Source: TechCrunch