Feeling, not just seeing: robotics start-up Eka raises 150 million dollars
The start-up of MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal is valued at 1.45 billion dollars after a round led by a16z and F-Prime. Its robots grasp objects with the help of force sensors.
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Robotics start-up Eka Robotics has raised 150 million dollars in a Series A round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and F-Prime, giving a post-money valuation of 1.45 billion dollars. Eka was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja.
Instead of a so-called vision-language-action model, Eka relies on a vision-force-action model: besides camera images, the robots use the forces a force-sensitive gripper feels on contact. "Vision tells you roughly where the object is, what the pose is," Agrawal said. The model is trained mainly in simulation using reinforcement learning.
According to the company, in lab tests the robot picks around 1,500 objects weighing up to one kilogram per hour, compared with about 600 for humans. "They are already exceeding superhuman performance for certain tasks," said a16z partner Raghu Raguram. These figures have not been independently verified, and Eka has not yet named any customers.