a16z leads Series A in Eka Robotics, betting on force-aware dexterous manipulation
a16z Newsletter · rss · 2026-10-20
a16z announced it led a Series A in Eka Robotics, betting that dexterous manipulation is one of robotics' biggest opportunities.
Key points:
- Much of the physical economy still depends on human hands; variable real-world conditions (moving parts, deforming materials, slipping objects) keep industrial robots out of these tasks.
- Eka builds a Vision-Force-Action model combining vision with force feedback, co-designing model, sensing, controller and hardware so contact itself becomes information: slips get corrected, insertion resistance changes motion instead of triggering errors.
- Instead of human demonstrations, Eka trains manipulation policies via reinforcement learning in physics simulation—millions of variations in position, friction and contact, including failure modes humans rarely demonstrate—so robot experience can scale with compute rather than human labor.
- Founders: MIT CSAIL's Pulkit Agrawal (computational sensorimotor learning) and Tuomas Haarnoja, co-creator of Soft Actor-Critic, formerly at Google DeepMind on humanoid simulation training.
- Performance: up to 1,500 picks per hour in lab induction and bin-picking, 2.5x faster than humans; sustaining that through full production shifts is the next test.
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