Eka Robotics reportedly hits $1.45B valuation with $150M Series A

Robots have long been great at lifting car doors and terrible at picking up a grape. Eka Robotics thinks it has closed that gap, and investors appear to agree. The Cambridge, Massachusetts startup has reportedly raised a $150 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. The pitch is a robotic arm that can grab a wide range of objects with motion smooth enough to look almost human. A unicorn with about 25 employees Eka was founded in 2025 by Pulkit Agrawal, a professor at MIT, and Tuomas Haarnoja, a former researcher at DeepMind. The company closed an $11 million seed round on May 9, 2025. Andreessen Horowitz and MFV Partners backed that round. If the reported Series A figures hold, the new round is more than 13 times the size of the seed. That jump happened in roughly a year. Eka employs approximately 25 people as of April 2026. Divide a $1 billion valuation by that headcount and you get about $40 million per employee. The startup’s public debut focused on everyday manipulation tasks like grasping and sorting objects. Teaching robots physics instead of imitation The core of Eka’s technology is what it calls a Vision-Force-Action (VFA) foundation model. The r...