Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Mecka AI is reportedly close to securing a Sequoia Capital-led financing that would peg the startup's value at roughly $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction. TechCrunch said it has not learned the exact size of the round, and that the terms are not finalized and could still change. Mecka did not reply to requests for comment and Sequoia declined to comment.

The two-year-old company builds datasets of human motion and interactions to help train humanoid robots and other robotic systems. Mecka pays people to capture everyday activities — such as making coffee or repairing a car — using body-worn sensors and smartphones, an “egocentric” data-collection method that records tasks from the human perspective.

The startup was founded in 2024 by four entrepreneurs: Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and operations lead Duy Nguyen. None of the co-founders come from traditional robotics backgrounds; instead they identified a shortage of physical-world data as a key barrier to broader robot capabilities and set out to address that gap. The company takes its name from “mecha,” the fictional concept of human-controlled giant robots.

Mecka announced a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures about three months before reports of the new deal. At the time of that fundraising, Gao told Fortune Mecka expected to reach a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026. The firm has not publicly disclosed its customer list, though egocentric and other real-world data approaches are widely used by robotics firms and AI labs.

The interest in Mecka comes amid broader investor attention to startups that supply real-world training data for robots. Other companies in the field include XDOF — which TechCrunch reported was nearing a funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation — and established human-data platforms expanding beyond large-language models, such as Scale AI and Micro1.