XDOF Nears $1.2 Billion, More Than Double Mecka AI's $500 Million

XDOF is in late-stage talks for a Series B that would value the robot-data startup at roughly $1.2 billion, TechCrunch reported Sept. 4, 2026, citing people familiar with the deal. A week later, TechCrunch reported that a competitor, Mecka AI, is separately nearing a round that would value it at about $500 million, less than half XDOF's number, for a business that does roughly the same thing: paying people to generate the physical-world data that trains robots.

Neither round has closed. Both are described as talks with terms still being finalized, the standard distance between an announced valuation and a signed term sheet. XDOF's talks are led by 8VC; Mecka's are led by Sequoia Capital. TechCrunch said it has not learned the exact size of Mecka's new round, only the valuation investors are discussing.

What three months apart looks like on paper

Both companies are raising again almost exactly three months after their last checks landed, a pace closer to founders chasing a narrow window than to a normal fundraising cycle.

Company	Last round	New valuation in talks	Lead
XDOF	$70 million Series A, June 2026	About $1.2 billion	8VC
Mecka AI	$60 million (Series A plus follow-on), June 2026	About $500 million	Sequoia Capital

XDOF was co-founded in 2024 by Philipp Wu, its chief executive, and Fred Shentu, its chief technology officer, both researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, according to TechCrunch. The company emerged from stealth in June 2026 and is partnering with UC Berkeley's own AI Research lab on a robot-data collection it calls ABC, which XDOF describes as the largest of its kind assembled so far.

Mecka AI was co-founded the same year by four people, including Chief Executive Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, both Canadian and previous co-founders of a restaurant fintech startup, and Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase after it acquired his earlier crypto exchange, Fortune reported June 1. A fourth co-founder, Duy Nguyen, is the only one of the four not Canadian. The company is based in New York and had 40 employees as of Fortune's reporting.

Two different bets on how a robot learns

The two companies collect different raw material for the same customers. XDOF combines remote teleoperation, where a human pilots a robot arm from elsewhere, with in-person collectors who wear sensors while performing tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes, and it counts 20 customers including several frontier AI labs on an annualized revenue run rate approaching $50 million, according to TechCrunch. Mecka pays people to record ordinary tasks using body sensors and phones rather than robot teleoperation at all, an approach the industry calls egocentric collection, and Gao told Fortune that signed contracts had the company on pace to exit 2026 at a $100 million annual run rate.

Both are selling into the same shortage: the robot foundation models the industry is racing to train need physical-world interaction data that, unlike text, was never sitting on the internet to scrape. Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer, whose firm led Mecka's prior round, told Fortune Mecka was the fastest-growing revenue company his firm had ever backed.

The data-supply layer is drawing money at a pace the robots themselves have not matched. Maven Robotics closed a $100 million Series A in the same stretch with just eight deployed units at a single customer, a reminder that the companies selling the picks and shovels for physical AI are, for now, raising faster than the companies putting robots to work.

The multiple nobody has said out loud

Measured against XDOF's approaching-$50 million run rate, a $1.2 billion valuation is a multiple of roughly 24 times current revenue. Mecka's $500 million figure looks tamer next to Gao's own $100 million target, at 5 times, but that target is a projection built on signed contracts rather than revenue already booked, and Fortune's reporting does not say what Mecka's revenue run rate actually was at the time of its June round. The two numbers are not measuring the same thing, which is itself the finding: one startup's multiple is priced against revenue it has, and the other's is priced against revenue its own chief executive expects by December.

The Series A number that does not match

XDOF's own history has a discrepancy neither company has resolved publicly. TechCrunch reported the company's June Series A at $70 million, backed by Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital and Spark Capital. Dealroom's database lists the same round at $45.3 million, a gap of nearly $25 million that neither source explains. Both figures describe the identical round, closed the same month, with no public filing available to settle which one is right.

What neither company has confirmed

Neither XDOF nor Mecka has disclosed the actual dollar size of the round being negotiated, only the resulting valuation, and both told TechCrunch the terms could still change before signing. Mecka has not named a single customer publicly, telling TechCrunch only that robotics companies and AI labs rely on its data alongside rival collection methods. The next thing to watch is not either headline number but whether a signed round, rather than a reported one, discloses what XDOF and Mecka actually took in.