Eka Robotics hits $1.45 billion valuation with $150 million Series A

Eka Robotics has closed a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, TechCrunch reported on October 20.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, who met in graduate school at UC Berkeley and specialize in reinforcement learning for robotic control.

Force sensing instead of human demonstrations

Eka has built what it calls a vision-force-action model, which links what a robot sees with the forces it feels to decide how to move, rather than relying mainly on vision and language. The system is trained with a physics simulator and large-scale reinforcement learning instead of videos of human demonstrations.

Its force-sensitive gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, with a goal of reaching the 20 million cycles standard for industrial arms. Eka says the robot picks about 1,500 objects weighing up to 1 kilogram per hour with a success rate above 95%.

Agrawal said vision is not the primary way to solve the “last millimeter problem” of precise manipulation. Raghu Raguram, a general partner at a16z, said the robot is already exceeding superhuman performance on certain tasks.

Kris Hauser, a robotics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the robot adapted to a large number of objects without retraining, but cautioned that working with integrators on real assembly lines will be a major challenge.