Eka Robotics, which gives robots a feel for force, raises $150 million at a $1.45 billion valuation

Eka Robotics, a robotics startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has closed a $150 million Series A. The round values the company at $1.45 billion post-money, TechCrunch reported on October 20. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and F-Prime, a fund affiliated with Fidelity, led the round. According to The Robot Report, Obvious Ventures, E14 Fund, Samsung Next and several unnamed Fortune 500 strategic investors also took part. The money will go toward scaling the technology and customer deployments.

MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja founded the company. Instead of a vision-language-action model, Eka builds what it calls a vision-force-action model, paired with a custom hand that carries more force sensors than typical grippers. The company says it uses a physics simulator and large-scale reinforcement learning to generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes. Eka says its robot picks about 1,500 objects of up to 1 kg per hour, compared with about 600 for a human. Those figures have not been independently benchmarked. The company is running confidential pilots with industrial customers.