Eka Robotics lands a16z-led Series A for force-based picking model; $1.45B value reported

Andreessen Horowitz said in an investment post on Oct 20 that it is leading the Series A of Eka Robotics, a startup building a vision-force-action model that treats contact forces from the robot's hand as a primary input alongside vision.

a16z wrote that Eka reports up to 1,500 picks per hour in laboratory induction and bin-picking tasks, two and a half times faster than humans, and that the company designs its model, sensing, controller and hardware together.

TechCrunch reported the round at $150 million at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, co-led with F-Prime; neither Eka nor a16z states the amount or valuation on its own pages, so MEKAWIRE treats those figures as unconfirmed.

Eka was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja, a co-creator of the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm, and its site describes force as the native language of the physical world. MEKAWIRE context: if confirmed, the round would follow Dream Labs' $90 million seed on Oct 19 as the second large robot-intelligence financing in two days, and Eka's picking claims are lab results, with pilots at industrial customers not yet public.