Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A to give industrial robots a sense of touch

Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion valuation to bring touch-based manipulation to industrial robots.

Cambridge, Massachusetts startup Eka Robotics has raised $150 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $1.45 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime led the round, with Obvious Ventures, E14 Fund, MFV Partners, Bison Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, and Samsung Next participating. The company, founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, exited stealth with the announcement on October 20.

Eka's bet is that touch, not just vision, is the missing piece in robotic manipulation. Its vision-force-action model combines camera input with force feedback from sensors in the gripper, letting robots adjust their grasp when an object slips or resists, the kind of fine control needed for the final millimeter of a pick. The company says the approach lets its robots handle unfamiliar objects without retraining.

Eka says its robots pick about 1,500 objects per hour for items up to 1 kilogram, with a success rate above 95%, against roughly 600 per hour for a human worker. Its gripper costs under $1,000 and packs a denser network of force sensors than a typical robot claw, and the company says it can pick delicate items such as berries without crushing them. Training happens mostly in a physics simulator using reinforcement learning rather than human demonstrations, generating thousands of hours of robot experience in minutes.

The round puts Eka among the most heavily funded young companies in physical AI, after an $11 million seed round co-led by Obvious and E14 in May 2025. The company says it is running pilots with unnamed industrial customers on pick-and-place and wire-handling work. Whether lab rates hold up on real factory floors is still unproven, but with $150 million behind it, touch has become one of the most expensive bets in robotics.