Eka Robotics raises $150M to build robots that grip by feel

Eka Robotics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup, raised a $150M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, valuing the company at $1.45B post-money, according to TechCrunch. Earlier seed investors Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund joined again, along with MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Samsung Next, and unnamed larger companies.

The company's approach combines vision with force feedback from sensors in a custom-built robotic hand, letting a robot feel when its grip is slipping and correct it, rather than relying on vision alone. Co-founder Pulkit Agrawal said the hand's hardware costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, with a goal of reaching 20 million. Eka trains its models through trial and error in a physics simulator using reinforcement learning, then transfers the learned skills to real hardware, saying it can generate thousands of hours of simulated robot experience in minutes.

According to TechCrunch, Eka's robots pick objects they weren't trained on at 1,500 per hour, about 2.5 times a human's roughly 600, and succeed more than 95% of the time on objects up to 1kg, though TNW notes it hasn't independently verified those figures. The company is running pilots with industrial customers in pick-and-place and wire handling but hasn't named them.

Why it matters

It's a well-funded bet that force-sensing, simulation-trained robots can crack the hard last-inch problem of real-world manipulation that pure vision struggles with.

Source: The Next Web