Mecka AI, a startup that pays contributors to record themselves performing everyday tasks with body sensors and a smartphone, is nearing a funding round that would value it at roughly $500 million, TechCrunch reported on 11 September, with Sequoia Capital in the lead. Terms are described as near final but not yet closed, and neither the amount being raised nor a closing date has been disclosed.
The round would come only three months after Mecka closed a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures, with Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred Ventures also participating, announced in June. Mecka’s four co-founders, Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong and Duy Nguyen, none of them from a robotics background, started the company in 2024 on the premise that human motion data, not algorithms, is the real bottleneck holding back general purpose robots.
The pitch is straightforward. Humanoid robot developers need enormous volumes of real world footage of people folding laundry, stocking shelves and the rest of daily labour, and Mecka pays ordinary people to generate it rather than relying on staged studio capture. Gao has said the company was projecting an annual revenue run rate of $100 million by the end of 2026, a figure that is a forecast rather than an audited result.
The size of the jump is hard to judge on its own terms. Mecka’s June round disclosed the amount raised but not the valuation behind it, so there is no way to tell whether $500 million is a modest step up or a leap. What last week’s reporting did not settle is whether Sequoia’s round actually closes at that number, on a business whose headline revenue figure is still a projection rather than a result.
