MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal's startup is valued at $1.45 billion after a Series A round led by a16z and F-Prime.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Eka Robotics has closed a $150 million Series A round that values it at $1.45 billion after the deal. The round is led by a16z and F-Prime, with participation from its seed investors Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund, as well as MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Samsung Next and several unnamed Fortune 500 groups. The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja.
A "vision-force-action" model
Where most players rely on vision-language-action models, Eka combines a force-sensitive gripper with a model that directly integrates force feedback. Its control policies are trained by reinforcement learning in a physics simulator, where virtual robots repeat a very large number of variants and failures before being deployed.
The company reports about 1,500 seizures of objects weighing less than one kilogram per hour, compared to some 600 for a human operator, with more than 95% success. The gripper would cost less than $1,000 and would be designed for 5 million cycles.
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