Analysis
Mecka AI, a robot-training data startup, raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with Nvidia and Microsoft's venture fund M12 among the participants, TechCrunch reported. TechCrunch had previously reported the company was nearing a round at a $500 million valuation, though neither the company nor this latest report confirms a post-money figure for the new round.
Paying People to Train Robots
Founded in 2024, Mecka collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems. The company pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks — making coffee, fixing cars — while wearing body sensors and using smartphones, then turns that movement data into training sets for robot manufacturers. TechCrunch frames the ambition directly: Mecka wants to do for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor and Surge did for large language models, building the data layer underneath a wave of AI applications rather than the applications themselves.
“## Paying People to Train Robots Founded in 2024, Mecka collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems.”
That positioning puts Mecka in a genuinely active niche. XDOF, a direct competitor, was separately reported in talks for its own Series B at a roughly $1.2 billion valuation — more than double Mecka's rumored mark — suggesting investors see real differentiation potential in how different startups capture and structure motion data, even within the same end market. Scale AI and Micro1, both of which built their businesses on human-labeled data for LLMs, are also expanding into robotics data, adding incumbent competition with existing enterprise relationships that Mecka will have to displace or coexist with.
Sequoia's leadership, paired with Nvidia and M12 as participants rather than lead, suggests the round is as much about securing strategic access to compute and cloud infrastructure partners as it is about the capital itself — both Nvidia and Microsoft have direct interests in robotics training data feeding back into their own chip and cloud platforms. The gap between Mecka's $60 million raised and its reported $500 million target valuation is worth sitting with: TechCrunch's reporting on the valuation predates this close, and the absence of a confirmed number in the actual funding announcement means that figure should be treated as reported, not settled.
Contracted robot manufacturers actually paying for training data, not funding valuations, is the metric that will separate a durable data business from a well-funded one — and neither Mecka nor XDOF has disclosed that number yet.