Eka Robotics has raised a $150 million Series A to move its force-sensing robot system from laboratory demonstrations into industrial deployments, where durability remains a disclosed constraint. Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime led the October 20 round; TechCrunch reported that it values the startup at $1.45 billion post-money.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company is starting with pick-and-place and wire-handling work. Its Vision-Force-Action model combines cameras with sensors in a custom robotic hand, allowing contact data to guide a correction when a grip slips or a connector resists.
Eka trains manipulation policies through reinforcement learning in physics simulations, exposing virtual robots to changes in object position, friction and contact before transferring the learned behavior to physical hardware. The approach is intended to reduce dependence on human demonstrations and task-by-task retuning, although contact behavior has historically been difficult to reproduce accurately in simulation.
The published performance figures remain company claims. Eka says its robots complete up to 1,500 picks per hour in laboratory induction and bin-picking tasks, compared with a human baseline of about 600. TechCrunch reported that the system handles objects weighing up to one kilogram with a success rate above 95%, while TNW said it had not verified those results.
Factory readiness has a more concrete benchmark. Co-founder Pulkit Agrawal told TechCrunch that Eka’s gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, while the company is targeting the 20 million-cycle standard of industrial robot arms. The current rating is one-quarter of that target.
Eka said the capital will expand its model to more tasks and accelerate customer deployments. TechCrunch reported pilots with a number of unnamed industrial customers, but did not disclose whether they are paid, how long they have operated or how the system has performed outside the laboratory.