Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A at $1.45B valuation

Eka Robotics raised a $150M Series A led by a16z and F-Prime at a $1.45B post-money valuation. Founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, the company's core technology is a visuotactile-action model that, unlike mainstream approaches, treats force sensing as an input on par with language and action. Its companion gripper costs under $1,000, is rated for 5 million work cycles, and targets the 20 million cycles typical of industrial arms. Per the source, the arm grasps about 1,500 objects under 1 kg per hour versus roughly 600 for humans, with over 95% reliable grasp rate and no retraining needed across many objects. Training relies on a physics simulator that models the forces encountered during grasping, then builds a massively parallel RL environment, reportedly generating thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes. For integrators and production teams doing industrial grasping and cable work, the value is that data no longer depends on human demonstrations. But the company is still running confidential pilots with industrial customers; moving from lab to line requires a year of uninterrupted operation, and current demos focus on pick-and-place, leaving generalization to more value-added tasks unproven.