a16z leads Eka Robotics Series A, betting on Vision-Force-Action models for dexterous manipulation
a16z · x · 2026-10-20
a16z announced it led Eka Robotics' Series A, calling dexterous manipulation one of robotics' biggest opportunities.
- Eka built a Vision-Force-Action model combining visual perception with force feedback from robotic hands; model, sensing, and hardware are co-designed so physical contact itself becomes information
- Founder Pulkit Agrawal leads MIT CSAIL's Improbable AI Lab; co-founder Tuomas Haarnoja co-created foundational modern RL algorithms at Berkeley and trained complex humanoid behaviors at Google DeepMind
- If Eka's approach scales, robot experience could increasingly scale with compute rather than human labor
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