XDOF In Talks for Series B at $1.2 Billion Valuation

XDOF is in late-stage talks for a Series B that would value the robot-data startup at about $1.2 billion, led by the venture firm 8VC, TechCrunch reported on Sept. 4. The talks come three months after XDOF left stealth with a $70 million Series A.

TechCrunch said the terms are not final and that it could not learn the total new capital being raised or whether the $1.2 billion figure includes that new money. XDOF's Series A, announced June 17 with Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux and Spark Capital, never disclosed a valuation, so a completed Series B would be XDOF's first public price tag.

What XDOF sells, and to whom

XDOF was founded in October 2024 by three UC Berkeley researchers: chief executive Philipp Wu, chief technology officer Fred Shentu and chief operating officer Nemo Jin. The company builds data pipelines, collection tools and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies use to train robots, paying human collectors to wear sensors performing tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes, and running teleoperation sessions that capture how a robot arm should move.

The company has about 60 employees and roughly 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs it would not name. Annualized revenue is approaching $50 million, growth that TechCrunch said is what prompted investors to approach XDOF about a new round rather than the other way around.

The dataset behind the pitch

XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley's AI Research lab to release a dataset called ABC, which the company said is among the largest collections of real-world robot manipulation data assembled to date.

ABC dataset	Figure
Manipulation trajectories	130,000
Simulation hours	300
Evaluation hours	100

Wu told TechCrunch in June that "all of the top labs are trying to pursue robotics," adding that the industry has "already seen some of the downfalls of falling a little bit behind in the language model race." That is the pitch: physical-world training data as the next bottleneck after text.

How the number stacks up against the comparison investors are using

Investors describe XDOF as the Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, a reference to the data-labeling firms that supplied training data for the last generation of language models. It is the same fast-re-rating pattern seen in Gimlet Labs' own Series B, which priced the AI-inference startup 7.5 times higher than its March mark after five months. The comparison has a size problem. Meta's $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI in June 2025 valued that company at $29 billion, according to TechCrunch's reporting on the deal at the time. XDOF's talked-about $1.2 billion is about 4% of that figure.

1. Scale AI (Meta stake, June 2025)29 $ billion
2. XDOF (Series B talks, Sept. 2026)1.2 $ billion

Source: TechCrunch, accessed 2026-09-15

That gap is not a knock on XDOF specifically. Scale AI spent seven years building toward its Meta deal; XDOF is three months out of stealth and, like HiddenLayer's most recent round, still has not put a public number on what its equity is worth outside of talks that have not closed. Whether $1.2 billion holds, changes or falls apart is a fact only a signed term sheet will settle, and neither XDOF nor 8VC has produced one yet.