Mecka AI, which collects human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems, is in talks to raise new funding led by Sequoia Capital at roughly a $500 million valuation, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
The round comes three months after the two-year-old startup raised $60 million in a Series A from Framework Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.
Mecka AI's business model is straightforward: pay people to perform everyday tasks—making coffee, fixing cars—recorded via body sensors and smartphones. That egocentric data becomes the training material for robots. The company co-founded in 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen has identified what it sees as the binding constraint on robot development: physical-world training data, not algorithms.
None of the co-founders came from robotics. Gao and Cheng, both Canadian, previously built a restaurant fintech startup. Chong joined Coinbase after his crypto exchange was acquired. But they spotted a gap: while Scale AI and others industrialized data labeling for large language models, no one had built the equivalent for robotics—generating video and sensor data of humans performing real tasks.
Mecka is modeled explicitly on that playbook. The name itself references "mecha," the fictional giant robots of anime, a nod to the company's ambition to do for physical-world data what Scale did for synthetic labeling.
As of June, the company projected $100 million in annual run rate by the end of 2026, according to statements made by Gao during the prior fundraise announcement. The customer base remains undisclosed, though robotics firms and AI labs are known to rely on egocentric motion capture alongside teleoperation for robot training.
The sector has become crowded. XDOF, another robotics data startup, was recently reported to be raising at a $1.2 billion valuation. Scale AI and Micro1 are both expanding beyond LLM labeling into robotics data services.
Mecka AI declined to comment. Sequoia declined to comment on the prospective round. The terms are not final and could still shift.
