TechCrunch reported on 20 October that Eka Robotics closed a $150 million Series A led by a16z and F-Prime, valuing the startup at $1.45 billion post-money. Founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, Eka is developing a force-sensitive gripper and a model for controlling robotic manipulation.
Eka trains its vision-force-action model through simulated encounters with objects, rather than relying on videos of people or robot operators performing tasks. Its robot can pick up about 1,500 objects weighing up to 1 kg in an hour, compared with about 600 for a human, TechCrunch reported. Eka says the robot picks up objects successfully more than 95% of the time.
The company is running industrial pilots involving pick-and-place and wire manipulation. Kris Hauser, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said operating without breakdowns for a year on an assembly line would be a challenge. Agrawal said Eka’s gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles. His goal is to reach the 20 million-cycle benchmark set by standard industrial arms.
