Mecka AI Nears $500 Million Valuation as Sequoia Capital Weighs Leading New Funding Round
Saturday, 12 September 2026, 03:01
The startup is turning ordinary human movements into a valuable resource, while a crowded field of data providers races to support the next generation of robots.
Startup Mecka AI, which collects and analyzes data on human movements to train humanoid robots, is nearing a new funding round at a valuation of approximately $500 million. According to two people familiar with the negotiations, the round could be led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
The exact investment amount has not yet been disclosed. The terms of the deal have not been finalized and may still change. Mecka AI did not comment on the negotiations, while Sequoia Capital declined to comment.
If the deal closes, the new funding will come roughly three months after the company’s previous $60 million round. That round was led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.
Mecka AI is building a database for robots
The company was founded in 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Chen, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen. Gao and Chen previously founded a financial startup for the restaurant industry. After his cryptocurrency exchange was acquired, Chong joined Coinbase, while Nguyen oversees operations at Mecka AI.
The founders had no prior experience in robotics, but they identified the lack of data on human interaction with the physical world as one of the key challenges in creating general-purpose robots. Mecka AI pays participants for video recordings of them performing everyday and professional tasks. Smartphones and sensors that capture body movements are used for this purpose.
Participants can record a variety of activities, from making coffee to repairing cars. The resulting material helps developers train models that control robots. At the same time, the robotics industry is using teleoperation to gather data and test algorithms in real-world conditions.
The name Mecka comes from the word “mecha,” a fictional giant robot controlled by a human. The startup aims to build data infrastructure for robotics similar to what Scale AI, Mercor, and Surge are developing for training large language models.
Company plans and intensifying competition
In early June 2026, Josh Gao told Fortune that Mecka AI expects to end the year with an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $100 million. The company does not disclose its customers, but robotics developers and research labs are actively using data recorded from a human perspective.
Competition in the market is also intensifying. Startup XDOF is nearing a new funding round at a valuation of $1.2 billion Data-collection platforms, including Scale AI and Micro1, are expanding beyond preparing datasets for large language models
Potential funding for Mecka AI at a valuation of around $500 million points to growing investor interest in data for robotics. As humanoid systems advance, the scale and quality of such datasets could become some of the industry’s most important competitive factors.
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