Eka Robotics Sold About 10 Percent for $150 Million at $1.45 Billion

Eka Robotics announced a $150 million Series A on Oct. 20 at a reported $1.45 billion post-money valuation, SiliconANGLE reported. Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime, a venture fund affiliated with Fidelity's parent FMR, led it. Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund, which co-led the May 2025 seed, also took part.

The valuation is the number that will travel. The more useful one is the share: if the full $150 million is new money, it bought about 10.3 percent of the company, a calculation of ours from the reported figures. That is a modest stake for a round this size, and it follows a seed that PitchBook puts at $11 million, for roughly $161 million raised in total. Announced and closed are different words; the sources describe the round as raised but name no filing.

What the company sells

Eka, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, builds a vision-force-action model, which takes camera images and force readings from a custom gripper and outputs motions. Founders are Pulkit Agrawal, an MIT associate professor, and Tuomas Haarnoja, who came from Google DeepMind and co-created the Soft Actor-Critic training algorithm. Robots learn by trial and error in simulation, then transfer to hardware.

The numbers below are the company's own. The Terminal could not independently verify any of them.

Claim (vendor-supplied)	Figure
Objects handled per hour	About 1,500, versus a human baseline of about 600
Pick success, objects up to 1 kg	More than 95 percent
Gripper cost	Under $1,000
Gripper rated life	5 million duty cycles, against 20 million for standard industrial arms

The last row is the one the pitch does not lead with. A gripper rated for a quarter of the cycles of a standard industrial arm is a consumable, and the cost of replacing it belongs in any per-pick economics.

Priced against its peers

Tech Funding News sets Eka against other physical-AI rounds. Physical Intelligence is reportedly valued at about $11 billion, which makes Eka roughly 13 percent of that. Generalist raised nearly $200 million in August at a reported $3 billion. Skild AI raised $1.4 billion in January at a valuation above $14 billion. THEKER's $85 million Series A in June, led by CRV, was about 1.8 times smaller than Eka's.

1. Skild AI (above, Jan.)14 $ billion
2. Physical Intelligence (about)11 $ billion
3. Generalist (Aug.)3 $ billion
4. Eka Robotics (Oct.)1.45 $ billion

Source: Tech Funding News and SiliconANGLE, accessed 2026-10-24

None of those peers shares Eka's narrow focus, so the comparison is by stage and not by product. It does show the price of a manipulation model with no named customer: about $1.45 billion.

What would falsify the pitch

Pilots with industrial customers are under way, per SiliconANGLE, but it names none. Eka says use cases include packing strawberries and assembling GPU server racks. Kris Hauser, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the demo had a "wow factor" but questioned whether the system could run a year on an assembly line without failure, and said generalisation beyond pick-and-place is still open.

Funds go to extending the model to more tasks and speeding deployments. The next observable event is a named production-line customer; until one appears, the 1,500-an-hour figure is a lab number. See also Dream Labs' robot API pricing, which gives a per-hour price for comparison, and the FCC covered-list decision on robotic devices.