Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A at $1.45B valuation for physical AI manipulation

Eka Robotics, a robotics startup focused on physical AI, has closed a $150 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion. The round was co-led by venture funds a16z and F-Prime.

The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. Its manipulation architecture combines a force-sensitive gripper with a new type of deep learning model. According to Eka, its robot can pick up around 1,500 objects weighing up to 1 kg per hour, with a success rate above 95%, outpacing human pick rates.

Raghu Raguram, the a16z general partner who co-led the round, said the robot is already exceeding superhuman performance on certain tasks and predicted superhuman performance in many dexterous manipulation tasks in the coming months. Robotics researchers who saw the system praised its ability to adapt to different objects without retraining and noted its "humanness" in handling failures.

Eka says its approach relies on a vision-force-action model rather than a vision-language-action model, using physics simulation to create reinforcement learning environments. The company is currently running pilot programs with industrial customers for pick-and-place and wire manipulation tasks.