Eka Robotics raises $150M Series A at $1.45B valuation, betting on force sensing
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-10-21
Eka Robotics raised a $150M Series A at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime Capital. The founding team includes an MIT professor and Tuomas Haarnoja, the former DeepMind researcher behind Soft Actor-Critic, one of the most influential RL algorithms of the last decade.
Unlike nearly everyone else building VLAs, Eka is building a Vision-Force-Action architecture: instead of predicting actions from cameras alone, its force-sensitive gripper lets the robot feel what it touches and feed that signal into the control loop. One roboticist compared the demo to the moment robots first achieved reliable legged locomotion.
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