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Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led round
Mecka AI is nearing a Sequoia Capital-led financing round that would value the robotics-data startup at about $500 million. The deal follows the company’s $60 million raise led by Framework Ventures and its push to collect human motion data
AI.info Team ·
“I mean, this is the fastest-growing revenue company that we’ve ever invested in, so the proof is in the business itself.”
Vance Spencer, cofounder, Framework Ventures
Mecka AI is nearing a new financing round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of about $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
The proposed financing would arrive roughly three months after Mecka announced $60 million in funding led by Framework Ventures. The size of the Sequoia-led round has not been determined publicly, and the terms could still change before the deal closes. Mecka AI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, while Sequoia declined to comment.
Sequoia targets the data behind physical AI
New York-based Mecka collects and analyzes human motion data for companies building humanoid and other robots. Its approach starts with people rather than machines: Mecka pays participants to record everyday activities, including making coffee and repairing cars, using body sensors and smartphones.
The resulting material is intended to help robotics companies train systems on how humans move through real environments. That puts Mecka in a part of the market that sits between data collection, model development, and deployment support, rather than in the hardware business.
Mecka’s founders recognized what they saw as a shortage of physical-world data while studying how general-purpose robots are trained. The four-person founding team includes Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who previously built a restaurant-fintech company; Jason Chong, whose earlier crypto exchange was acquired by Coinbase; and Duy Nguyen, who leads operations.
A $60M raise preceded the new talks
Framework Ventures led Mecka’s earlier financing, which consisted of a $25 million Series A completed in November and a $35 million follow-on investment. Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures also participated, alongside angel investor Ted Xiao, a former Google DeepMind researcher and founding member of Jeff Bezos’s AI startup Project Prometheus.
Mecka disclosed the combined $60 million in June but did not reveal its valuation. At the time, Gao said the company had signed enough contracts to project a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026. Mecka did not identify those customers publicly.
“Useful robots can be deployed today,” Gao told Fortune, “and immediately.”
Human motion becomes a commercial dataset
Mecka’s model depends on capturing movement outside controlled robot demonstrations. Body-worn sensors and phones can record hand gestures, walking patterns, and task-specific actions across homes, workshops, laboratories, and other settings, while the company’s internal systems turn that raw material into data that robotics teams can use.
The company’s pitch differs from teleoperation, in which a person manually controls a robot to generate training examples. Human recordings can provide a broader set of natural movements and environments, although the data still has to be synchronized, labeled, and translated into forms that a robot can interpret.
Mecka has not disclosed its customer list or the terms on which it sells access to its data. That limits outside scrutiny of the $100 million run-rate projection and leaves the company’s commercial position difficult to measure independently.
The deal is not finished
The prospective valuation reflects investor interest in the supply of physical-world data, but it is not a completed financing. TechCrunch has not learned the precise size of the new round, and neither Mecka nor Sequoia has confirmed the proposed price.
For Mecka, the timing would give the company a rapid step-up from its June financing and place it among a group of startups attracting large checks for data used in robotics. The immediate facts are narrower: Sequoia is leading talks, the valuation is about $500 million, and the final terms remain unsettled.