Mecka AI nears $500 million valuation in new Sequoia-led funding round

Robot training data startup Mecka AI is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of about $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.

The financing comes just three months after Mecka raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred Ventures. The exact size of the new round has not been learned, and the terms are not final and could still change. Mecka AI did not respond to a request for comment, and Sequoia declined to comment.

Mecka was founded in 2024 by four entrepreneurs: Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who previously built a restaurant fintech startup; Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase after it acquired his crypto exchange; and Duy Nguyen, the only non-Canadian on the team, who focuses on operations. None of the four have a background in robotics. They concluded that a shortage of physical-world data was the main obstacle holding back general-purpose robots, including humanoids.

The company’s name comes from “mecha,” a fictional giant robot piloted by a human operator. Mecka pays people to record themselves doing everyday tasks, such as making coffee or fixing a car, using body sensors and smartphones. That method, known as egocentric capture, films tasks from the worker’s own point of view. The startup aims to do for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor and Surge have done for large language models: supply the human-generated data needed to train the systems.

Growth targets

As of early June, Mecka was projecting it would end 2026 at an annual run rate of $100 million, co-founder Josh Gao told Fortune when the company announced its previous fundraise. Mecka has not publicly disclosed its customer list. Robotics companies and AI labs rely on data captured through the egocentric method, often alongside other physical data collection approaches such as teleoperation, where a human remotely controls a robot to demonstrate a task.

Mecka is one of several startups racing to supply data for robot training. XDOF, another company in the space, was reported last week to be nearing a new round at a $1.2 billion valuation. Human-data platforms that built their businesses on training large language models, including Scale AI and Micro1, are also expanding into robotics data.

Whether the Sequoia-led round closes at the reported terms, and what its final size turns out to be, has not been confirmed. The deal was described as still in flux at the time it was reported.