Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving

Eka Robotics, founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, has closed a $150 million Series A round led by a16z and F-Prime at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation. The company's physical AI model—a vision-force-action architecture rather than a vision-language-action model—enables a force-sensitive robotic gripper to pick up about 1,500 objects per hour with over 95% reliability, exceeding human performance. Experts, including University of Illinois professor Kris Hauser and an anonymous frontier lab roboticist, describe the robot's dexterity, adaptability without retraining, and gentle handling of delicate items like raspberries as remarkable, with some comparing the moment to the first reliable legged locomotion. The model uses a physics simulator and reinforcement learning to generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes, avoiding reliance on human demonstration videos. Eka is now running secretive industrial pilots in pick-and-place and wire manipulation, but faces challenges in scaling to real assembly lines where reliability and task generalizability must be proven.

(Source：TechCrunch)