Eka

Robotics startup Eka raises a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion valuation for its force-sensing manipulation model, per TechCrunch

Not confirmed by the company — reported on Oct 20, 2026 (source: techcrunch.com).

Eka Robotics, founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, closed a $150 million Series A led by a16z and F-Prime that values it at $1.45 billion post-money, TechCrunch reports. Instead of a vision-language-action model, Eka uses what it calls a vision-force-action model with a force-sensitive gripper, trained with reinforcement learning in a physics simulator. Eka says the arm picks about 1,500 objects of up to 1 kg per hour, versus about 600 for a person, and succeeds more than 95% of the time. The company is running pilots with industrial customers in pick-and-place and wire handling.