Analysis
Mecka AI is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of about $500 million, TechCrunch reported, just three months after a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred Ventures. TechCrunch reported the precise size and terms of the new round aren't yet final.
Mecka was co-founded in 2024 by four entrepreneurs, including Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who previously built a restaurant fintech startup together, and Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase after it acquired his crypto exchange. The company's business model pays crowdsourced workers to record themselves, using body sensors and smartphones, performing everyday tasks like making coffee or repairing a car -- data used to train humanoid robots and other robotics systems on real-world motion.
Mecka is competing for the same robot-training-data wedge as Physical Intelligence and Skild AI, the latter of which raised $1.4 billion earlier this year at north of a $14 billion valuation building general-purpose robot AI. The category has drawn a wave of capital in 2026 as major robotics labs increasingly say they're bottlenecked on real-world motion data rather than raw compute -- a very different constraint than the chip shortage dominating the rest of this issue's AI infrastructure coverage.
An roughly eightfold valuation jump in three months, on a company that was projecting only $100 million in annual run-rate revenue by the end of 2026 as of early June, is a steep multiple even against 2026's frothy funding environment -- though it tracks the broader land grab for robotics training data more than it reflects any newly disclosed revenue milestone.
What to watch: TechCrunch hasn't confirmed the exact round size, and whether Mecka's data-quality and labeling accuracy hold up once well-funded competitors like Skild AI and Physical Intelligence start getting directly compared head-to-head by the robotics labs actually buying this data.
