ANALYSIS Mecka AI's $60 million Series B, backed by Sequoia, Nvidia, and Microsoft's M12, sits alongside LG Electronics' quiet buildout of its own robot-data factory. Mecka describes the shortage of real-world motion data as "the biggest bottleneck in robotics"10. Together, the two developments mark the moment physical-AI data graduated from a research concern into a standalone, venture-scale business.
Why it matters
"Motion, contact, force and geometry aren't on the internet. You can't scrape them, license them or buy them," Mecka wrote in its Series B announcement. That gap is now attracting the same investor class that funded Scale AI and other data-labeling platforms for language models. Mecka's round drew not only Sequoia but also Nvidia, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung, and M1211. Angel investors include DoorDash founder and CEO Tony Xu, former ServiceNow and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, and former Tesla Optimus head Milan Kovac. ◆ The breadth of the cap table, spanning chip vendors, device makers, and operators with direct robotics programs, signals that multiple parts of the value chain view robot-training data as a strategic input worth securing early.
The big picture
Mecka, founded in 2024, pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks while wearing body sensors and using smartphones1. The company converts those recordings into training signals that include motion tracking, 3D reconstruction, and sensor alignment. It said it surpassed $100 million in run-rate revenue in June 2026 and projects a $300 million run rate by year-end. The company describes the data shortage as "the biggest bottleneck in robotics" and predicts data will become a trillion-dollar market.
Mecka is not alone. TechCrunch previously reported that XDOF, another real-world robotics data startup, was in talks to raise a Series B at a $1.2 billion valuation. Human-data platforms that began with LLMs, including Scale AI and Micro1, are also expanding into robotics.
Meanwhile, LG Electronics is building its own data pipeline. The company recently launched LG Data Factory, which collects and manages large-scale data required for robot learning3,7. LG presented plans to advance its robot foundation model by linking LG Data Factory with Nvidia's robotics solutions. LG is developing "physical AI," combining robotics and artificial intelligence, as a future growth engine and plans to add home robots to its existing industrial and commercial robot businesses.
ANALYSIS The parallel moves by a venture-backed startup and a global electronics conglomerate trace the same logic from different directions. Mecka is building a merchant data layer, selling training sets to any robotics developer. LG is constructing a captive pipeline tied to its own foundation model and Nvidia's stack. Both treat data collection and curation as the binding constraint on robot capability, not hardware, not algorithms.
Nvidia's presence on both sides of that divide is notable. The chipmaker participated in Mecka's round and is the solutions partner LG named for its foundation-model work. ◆ For Nvidia, funding the data layer complements its existing robotics simulation and training infrastructure; more usable data means more demand for the compute that processes it.
Mecka's revenue trajectory adds commercial weight to what could otherwise read as a thesis bet. The company said it is expanding from supplying robotics data into robot integration, post-training, and ongoing deployment services. ◆ That expansion from data vendor to deployment partner mirrors the path Scale AI took in the language-model market, moving from labeling into evaluation, fine-tuning, and government contracts.
LG's showcase of its humanoid robot LG CLOiD at the 2026 FIRST Global Challenge in Incheon, where youth teams from 185 countries competed on wildfire-response missions, offered a public-facing signal of the company's robotics ambitions4. ◆ Sponsoring a 185-country competition while simultaneously building a proprietary data factory positions LG to recruit talent and normalize its brand in a category where it has historically trailed dedicated robotics firms.
What's next
Mecka said the new capital will scale its data infrastructure, deepen its internal research lab, and build out commercial robot deployment. The company's $300 million run-rate target is set for year-end 2026. LG's next visible milestone is the integration of LG Data Factory outputs with Nvidia's robotics solutions to advance its foundation model. XDOF's reported $1.2 billion valuation talks, if closed, would further validate the category. Mecka's own round valued the company at $500 million, according to earlier TechCrunch reporting.