21 Oct 2026
Eka Robotics raises $150m to teach robot hands physics, not imitation
a16z and F-Prime lead the Series A, with seed leads Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund following on. Eka claims 1,500 picks an hour, about two…
Eka Robotics builds general-purpose robots for dexterous manipulation, driven by a vision-force-action model trained with simulation and reinforcement learning rather than human demonstrations.
EKA Robotics, Inc. builds robots for dexterous manipulation work, the picking, packing, inserting and assembling that has mostly stayed with human hands. Its core technology is a vision-force-action (VFA) model that combines what a robot sees with what it feels through force, and that is trained largely in simulation through reinforcement learning instead of by copying recordings of people doing the task.
The company argues that robotics has had to choose between generality, a robot that copes with new objects and settings without retraining, and performance, the speed and accuracy a production line needs. Its model is meant to deliver both. In simulation it can generate thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes while varying objects, environments and physical conditions, and then transfer that learning to real robots. Eka says its robots pick a wide variety of objects outside their training data at 1,500 operations an hour, against a human baseline of about 600, and that the same robot can also screw in a light bulb and insert wires. It describes the robots as safe to work alongside people.
The first applications Eka names are delicate handling and assembly: packing soft fruit such as strawberries and assembling GPU server racks. Its investors include several large companies that it describes as Fortune 500 strategic investors, and it says the new funding is for scaling customer deployments as well as the model.
Legal name: EKA Robotics, Inc. Product: robots running the Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model Founders named by investors: Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Funding: $150 million Series A announced 20 October 2026, led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, with Obvious Ventures, E14 Fund, MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures and Samsung Next Team background: MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, UPenn, DeepMind, Microsoft and Boston Dynamics, among others Contact: hello@ekarobotics.com
Profile written by TrustList from the business's own published information, Oct 2026.
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Updated 10/21/2026
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