Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A at $1.45B for force-sensing robot hands
What's the deal? Eka RoboticsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised $150 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, valuing the robot-manipulation startup at $1.45 billion post-money. Returning seed leads Obvious Ventures and E14 FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → joined, alongside MFV PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Bison VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Glasswing VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Samsung Next, and unnamed Fortune 500 strategics.
What's the endgame? Eka, founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, is building general-purpose robots that start with dexterous manipulation. The money will scale its technology and customer deployments.
How it works: Rather than a vision-language-action model, Eka uses a vision-force-action approach. Force sensors in a custom gripper tell the model how firmly a hand is holding an object, letting a robot adjust its grip mid-task if something slips. The company trains in simulation with reinforcement learning, generating thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes.
The numbers: Eka says its robots pick objects outside their training data at about 1,500 operations per hour, roughly 2.5 times the human baseline of about 600, succeeding on more than 95% of picks. The gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles; Eka wants to reach the 20 million standard industrial arms are built for.
What experts say: Kris Hauser, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said a demo had a "wow factor" next to other robots and that the machine "was able to adapt to a large number of different objects without retraining." He questioned whether it could run on an assembly line for a year without failure.
What could go wrong? Pilots with unnamed industrial customers are early, covering pick-and-place and wire-handling work. Eka's throughput and success rates are company claims; whether the system generalises beyond pick-and-place remains open.
The signal: At $150 million, Eka's round sits in the 99th percentile for US computer-vision Series A deals, a sign of investor appetite for AI that performs physical work, not just plans it. Recent checks — a reported $500 million Series A for Mind Robotics and $85 million for Sereact — point the same way. Commercial performance, not the headline speed claim, will decide whether Eka merits its valuation.
Read more: ekarobotics.com, TechCrunch
Image credit: Eka Robotics
