Big thing
Mecka AI raises a $60M Series B led by Sequoia
Mecka pays people to do everyday tasks while wearing its own multi-sensor rigs, then turns the footage into training data for robots. NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm and Samsung joined the round, and total funding passes $120M. Mecka says it passed a $100M run rate in June.
Welcomed as a bet on robotics' real bottleneck, data. Sequoia's @biad_anas: bringing AI into the physical world "will be a wave at least as large, but harder". @hiFramework, which led the Series A: "They project a $300M run rate by EOY." @Mortezabihzadeh: "this is a bigger deal than it looks".
Everyone says robots have no internet to learn from, but the 1M hours of video behind Dyna's laundry robot is 500 people filming their job for a year. At that price the labs can just buy one, and with $100M a year going to Mecka alone (its own number) they've started.
Labs news & launches
1. [rumour] NVIDIA is in talks to put another $1B into Figure
The Information reports that NVIDIA has discussed a further $1B investment in Figure, with no deal done. Figure's Nscale deal covers up to 100,000 Vera Rubin GPUs from the second half of 2027; @StockSavvyShay puts that at around 230 MW just for robot training.
Read as NVIDIA paying for its own demand. @mikekalilmfg: "This is a form of circular financing." If "even 25 percent" of that datacenter happens, "NVIDIA more than breaks even." @StockSavvyShay: "Physical AI adds a second demand curve for Nvidia".
Heat: medium · 208K views, 28 posts
2. [rumour] Tesla's former Optimus AI lead starts a robot company
The Information reports that Ashish Kumar co-founded Intelligent Machines, a San Francisco startup building non-humanoid robots for manufacturing and aerospace, and is raising a seed round that could reach about $100M. Several former Optimus engineers have joined him.
Few takes. The headline travelled through @zerohedge (116K). @AGTPinsights: Tesla's humanoid program "is losing talent to a rival that is building non-humanoid industrial robots."
Heat: medium · 145K views, 11 posts
3. REK puts swords on its fighting humanoids
REK's "Deathmatch" in San Francisco on 9 October is billed as the world's first humanoid weapon fight, between six-foot robots. Per @SFist, California officials ordered REK to stop its human-versus-robot fights two weeks ago (letter dated 23 September), after a cage match went viral.
Robot fighting had a good day. REK's @cixliv: "Our robot fights were too dangerous, so we put swords on them." Hours earlier, @DJiafei posted Singapore's first humanoid robot fight: "really cool to see a knockout!" (257K).
Heat: low · 82K views, 6 posts · 22 pts on r/accelerate
Key research
ENPIRE: a harness that lets AI agents run robotics research
It captures physical feedback from the robot so agents can improve policies with little human effort, reaching a 99% success rate on dexterous tasks like organizing a pin box or fastening a zip tie. It matters because the research loop itself is being automated, and @Ken_Goldberg is already asking for manufacturers who use this "Agentic Robotics" in production.
Long-WAM: robot world models that use 19 seconds of history
Growing the visual context from 0 to 19.2 seconds lifts success on RoboCasa GR-1 from 63.3% to 78.7%, but only when the video model was pretrained autoregressively. It matters because a robot needs to remember what just happened, and until now more history mostly meant slower actions.
LLMs nearly triple their score on a real-robot benchmark in two months
The best LLM score on RoboDojo-RC Tier 1 rose from 15% to 43%, with the top scores set by GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-6 Astra. It matters because general models are getting better at controlling robots without being built for it.
Capital & exits
- Mecka AI raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia, with NVIDIA, M12, Qualcomm and Samsung. Human motion data to train robots.