Eka Robotics raises $150 million to expand its vision-force-action model for robots

Eka Robotics this week said it raised $150 million in Series A funding. The startup said the new funding will help it scale its technology and customer deployments.

Founded in 2024, Eka is building a vision-force-action (VFA) model to develop insight into physics through large-scale reinforcement learning. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company said robots using its artificial intelligence can pick up a wide variety of objects outside the training deployment at a rate of about 1,500 operations per hour.

The same robots can screw in a light bulb and insert wires, Eka said.

Robots shouldn’t just imitate humans, says Eka Robotics

Eka Robotics said it is targeting skillful manipulation. The company said that for robots to handle complicated jobs, they need the versatility to handle changing conditions and the performance to do useful work every day.

Eka also said he believes robots should master physics, not mimic human data, to be truly general purpose. This would allow the robot to develop “intuition” for tasks in the same way a human can, jointly reasoning about vision and forces.

The company uses simulation learning and says its VFA model is showing that the typical barrier between simulation and reality is falling. In simulation, the company can generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes by varying objects, environments and physical conditions.

Eka said that transferring this learning to the real world unlocks a scalable, performant and capital-efficient path to a fundamental model for manipulation. “Large-scale reinforcement learning gains performance, and breadth of experience gains generality,” he said.

Investors seek to increase the level of skillful manipulation

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and F-Prime, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments, led the round.

“Eka’s Vision-Force-Action model is the first approach I’ve seen that truly solves manipulation with the generality and productivity needed for implementations,” said Raghu Raghuram, a general partner at a16z. “This team has the ideal DNA to push the frontiers of robotics research while expanding commercial operations.”

Eka Robotics’ Series A featured continued support from leading investors in its seed round, Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund. Other funding came from MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Samsung Next and several Fortune 500 strategics.

“From the factory floor, the value of a robot comes down to two things: its success rate and its speed with thousands of iterations,” said Shyam Kamadolli, managing director of Fine Structure Ventures. “From the beginning, I understood that current approaches to generalization simply would not get us there. Reaching the next level of performance requires a deep understanding of physics and, above all, breaking free from our dependence on human demonstrations.”

“Eka’s VFA model, trained through simulation and reinforcement learning, achieves this for the hardest problem in robotics, dexterous manipulation, in a way that no other company has done,” he added. “I truly believe that Eka’s approach is the only one that will hold up in real-world implementations of complex tasks.”