Eka Robotics has closed a $150 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime to scale its vision-force-action (VFA) model for robotic manipulation. The company says its robots pick objects at "superhuman" speed, 1,500 operations per hour against a human baseline of about 600.
Seed leads Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund continued their support. MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Samsung Next and several Fortune 500 strategic investors also joined. Metrology and Quality News reports the round values the company at roughly $1.45 billion. Pulkit Agrawal, an MIT researcher, and Tuomas Haarnoja, formerly of Google DeepMind, founded Eka.
VFA pairs camera input with force sensing, so the robot reads contact as well as appearance. Eka trains the model with reinforcement learning in simulation, where it says it can generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes while varying objects, environments and physical conditions. The company says the same robot picks objects outside its training distribution, screws in a light bulb and inserts wires. TechCrunch reported picking success rates above 95 percent for objects weighing up to one kilogram.
For manufacturing and automation engineers, the claim to watch is throughput on unfamiliar parts without retraining. Eka frames the problem directly: generality without performance, in its words, "is a lab demo." Raghu Raghuram, general partner at a16z, called VFA "the first approach I've seen that truly solves manipulation with the generality and throughput needed for deployments."
The gripper is rated for 5 million operating cycles, according to Metrology and Quality News, with a target of 20 million. Eka is working with industrial customers on pilots involving pick-and-place and wire manipulation, and the new funding will go toward adding tasks to the VFA model and speeding up customer deployments.
