Eka Robotics

Robotics · Physical AI · Venture Capital

Funding

Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A at $1.45B valuation

The startup bets that teaching robots to feel forces, not just see them, solves manipulation tasks vision alone can't crack.

• Eka Robotics closed a $150M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, valuing the robotics startup at $1.45B post-money, according to TechCrunch.
• Founded less than a year ago by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, Eka builds a force-sensitive gripper paired with a vision-force-action model for dexterous manipulation.
• Eka trains its models in physics simulation rather than on videos of human demonstrations, generating thousands of hours of synthetic robot experience in minutes.
• The company says its robot can pick up to 1,500 objects an hour, versus roughly 600 for a human, with a success rate above 95%.
• The custom gripper costs under $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, short of the 20-million-cycle benchmark set by standard industrial robotic arms.
• The raise follows an $11M seed round in May 2025, turning the roughly 25-person company into a billion-dollar startup within about a year of founding.
• Outside experts caution that Eka's industrial pilots remain unnamed, with one robotics professor noting that running a full year without breakdowns on an assembly line would be the real test.
• Eka's wager that force-sensing beats pure vision points to a broader shift toward touch-based physical AI, a capability most warehouse and humanoid robots still lack.