Mecka AI reveals $60-million USD Series B round backed by Sequoia, Nvidia

Toronto- and New York City-based Mecka AI has raised a $60-million USD ($86-million CAD) Series B round led by Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital.

Mecka announced the financing on Wednesday. It was supported by new backers like chip giant Nvidia, the corporate venture capital arms of Microsoft and Qualcomm, Samsung, and existing investors Kindred Ventures, Framework Ventures, and Neo. DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu, ex-ServiceNow and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, and the former head of Tesla Optimus Milan Kovac also participated.

Mecka aims to build “the data and deployment layer” for physical AI by providing real-world data to train robots.

The two-year-old startup also claimed it surpassed a $100-million USD run-rate in June and expects to hit $300 million by the end of this year.

Mecka aims to build “the data and deployment layer” for physical AI, providing real-world data sourced from body sensors and iPhones to train humanoids and other types of robots. Demand for this type of data—which, unlike the text, images, and video required to train large language models, cannot be scraped from the internet—is booming.

Mecka said this capital will help the company scale its data infrastructure, deepen its internal research lab, and build out its commercial robot deployment layer.

TechCrunch first reported last month that Mecka was raising a new Sequoia-led round at a valuation of about $500 million.

The new funding comes months after Mecka acquired small, bootstrapped Vancouver-based startup Docula and announced $60 million USD in Series A financing.

Mecka secured that amount across an initial, $25-million USD Series A round from last November and a $35-million extension that closed over the summer, financed by Framework, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred, and others.

Mecka is betting that video captured from a first-person human perspective will help robots learn faster and scale more efficiently. The company collects this data from home settings, culinary work, chemistry labs, task platforms, metal fabrication, and leather shops, and converts it into training-ready data for multiple frontier robotics labs and Big Tech firms.

The startup has built hardware replete with sensors to capture this data and the computer vision and multimodal models to turn it into usable training fodder for robots.

While Mecka is domiciled in the US, three of its four co-founders are Canadian, and the vast majority of its staff are in Toronto.

AI claimed nearly half of all venture dollars invested in Canada last year, and global interest in robotics, humanoid makers, and firms building embodied AI is heating up.

The Canadian Robotics Council has clocked “a rapid increase” in the number of robotics startups being launched, both at home and abroad. Vancouver’s A&K Robotics and NorBot, Winnipeg’s TetraGen Robotics, and Montréal-based Mecademic are among the other startups that have benefitted from this surge.

UPDATE (10/07/26): This story has been updated to include additional information shared by Mecka AI.

Feature image courtesy Mecka.