Robot-data startup Mecka buys Ottawa app Thirdspace in second acquihire of 2026
What's the deal? Mecka AI, a Toronto- and New York-based startup that supplies training data for robots, has acquired Ottawa social app ThirdspaceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in a cash-and-stock deal. Terms were not disclosed. Thirdspace's co-founders, Cedric Osagie and Eshan Betrabet, have joined Mecka to lead its mobile-capture efforts, while the app keeps running.
Why now? The deal closed a few weeks ago, around the same time Mecka announced a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm, and Samsung among the backers. The company plans to use the money to scale data collection and its robotics business.
The hire: Osagie is now Mecka's head of mobile capture, tasked with growing the company's home data-capture app. He and Betrabet launched Thirdspace last year as former Carleton University students; the app has passed 20,000 downloads and 60 million views on US$73.3K in angel funding.
What's the endgame? Mecka collects first-person video to help robots learn faster. Unlike the text and images used to train large language models, this data cannot be scraped from the internet — so growth depends on getting more people to capture it voluntarily. The roughly 80-person startup sells its data to frontier robotics labs and Big Tech firms.
Why the team matters? Mecka special projects lead Mark Grinev called Thirdspace's "small but mighty team" the "most important piece" of the deal. "They're exceptional growth hackers and thinkers, and they've captured this lightning in the bottle of what it takes to get viral," he said, adding that scaling the mobile app is "imperative" to Mecka's goals.
The signal: This is Mecka's second acquihire of the year, following Vancouver-based DoculaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and both deals point to the same strategy: using capital and targeted hires to build the consumer-growth muscle needed to collect real-world robot-training data. As competition to supply physical-AI data heats up, Mecka is betting that viral app-building is as critical as hardware and models.
Read more: letsdatascience.com
Image credit: Office of Naval Research
