Startup Mecka AI is nearing completion of a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of nearly $500 million, according to two people familiar with the deal. The round’s value and final terms have not yet been finalized, meaning the valuation and agreement could change before closing.
The potential deal comes just three months after the company announced that it had raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred Ventures. Mecka AI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, while Sequoia declined to comment.
A Bet on Real-World Data
Mecka AI was founded in 2024 by four co-founders, including Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who previously founded a financial technology company in the restaurant sector, as well as Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase after it acquired his cryptocurrency trading platform. Duy Nguyen, the non-Canadian member of the team, focuses on operations within the company.
The founders do not have prior backgrounds in robotics, but they built the company around the view that a shortage of real-world data is a bottleneck to developing general-purpose robots, including humanoid robots. The company pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks, such as making coffee or repairing cars, using body sensors and smartphones.
Mecka collects and analyzes these recordings to provide human-movement data that can be used to train robotics models. The approach resembles what human-data companies such as Scale AI, Mercor and Surge did for large language models, but shifts data collection to physical interactions in the real world.
Why Does This Matter?
If the deal closes, its speed and valuation would indicate growing investor interest in the infrastructure needed to develop robots, rather than in the robots themselves alone. Robotics models need many diverse examples of how humans move and interact with tools and different environments—data that text- or video-only training does not provide.
The funding also shows that data collection has become an independent field within the AI and robotics economy. Robotics companies and AI labs rely on multiple methods, including first-person recording, as well as collecting other data such as teleoperation.
What Remains Unresolved?
Mecka AI has not publicly disclosed its customer list, and the round’s value and terms have not been finalized. In early June, the company expected to finish 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million, according to a previous statement Gao made to Fortune, but the source provides no update on whether that expectation has been met.
The potential deal comes amid a broader wave in the sector; TechCrunch reported that XDOF is also nearing a new round at a valuation of $1.2 billion, while human-data platforms such as Scale AI and Micro1 are expanding their activities beyond large language models.