Eka Robotics raises Series A at $1.45 billion valuation

Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime led the Series A, which valued Eka at $1.45 billion post-money.[1][2] Eka says the new funding will support scaling its technology and customer deployments.[1] The company also says it plans to expand its Vision-Force-Action model to more tasks and accelerate those deployments.[1] Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund, which led Eka’s seed round, continued to support the company, according to Eka.[1] Other investors include MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Samsung Next and several Fortune 500 strategics, Eka says.[1]

Eka says its Vision-Force-Action model learns physical intuition through reinforcement learning at scale.[1] Andreessen Horowitz describes the system as combining visual perception with force feedback from the robot’s hands.[3] Eka says simulation lets it generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes while varying objects, environments and physical conditions.[1] The company says its robot can pick up varied objects outside its training distribution at 1,500 operations per hour.[1] Eka puts the human baseline at about 600 operations per hour, or roughly two and a half times slower.[1]

Eka says its robot can pick up about 1,500 objects weighing up to one kilogram in an hour and succeeds more than 95% of the time.[2] The company says the same robot can screw in a light bulb and insert wires.[1] Eka also reports manipulation demonstrations involving fragile objects, slippery industrial parts and contact-rich insertion tasks.[3] University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Kris Hauser said the robot adapted to many different objects without retraining and described its demonstration as having a “wow factor.”[2] Andreessen Horowitz general partner Raghu Raghuram said Eka’s robots already exceed human performance on some tasks.[2]