Mecka AI closes $60 million Series B funding with backing from giants including Sequoia, Nvidia, and Microsoft, pivoting from a Crypto points project to physical AI data infrastructure, with annualized revenue exceeding $100 million.
Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
A project that once attracted users to contribute data through Crypto-style points has now gained the support of tech giants and investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, and Microsoft, and is expected to generate $300 million in revenue by the end of the year.
This project is Mecka AI.
On October 7, Mecka AI announced the completion of a $60 million Series B funding round, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from new investors including Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm Ventures, and Samsung, while Framework Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and the startup incubator and VC Neo continued their support.
The company also disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate had already exceeded $100 million as of June 2026, and is expected to reach $300 million by the end of the year. It should be noted that this is the annualized revenue run rate disclosed by the company, not full-year revenue already realized.
For the Crypto industry, Mecka is not a completely unfamiliar AI company. It not only has investors from the crypto industry, but its founding team also has a Crypto background. More notably, Mecka early on launched a points program with crypto industry characteristics, which at one point sparked speculation among users about a future token issuance.
But now, Mecka's official website and funding announcements hardly emphasize Web3 anymore, instead positioning itself as a Physical AI data infrastructure company.
From Crypto points to the robot data business, what changes has Mecka undergone?
What is Mecka's background?
Mecka's four main co-founders are: Josh Gao (CEO), Jason Chong (CTO), Duy Nguyen (COO), and Mogen Cheng (CPO).
Interestingly, none of the four initially had a professional robotics research background. CEO Josh Gao co-founded a restaurant software startup with Mogen Cheng and sold the business in 2023.
Co-founder and CTO Jason Chong is a veteran of the Crypto industry. He previously founded the crypto payments startup Utopia Labs, which was later acquired by Coinbase. According to Fortune magazine, Duy Nguyen, who is in charge of operations, has experience in the sneaker resale business, having made millions of dollars by reselling sneakers.
Josh Gao once admitted in a Fortune interview that none of the team members came from the robotics industry. By reading research papers, visiting robotics labs, and communicating with researchers, they gradually discovered a problem: the robotics industry has increasingly advanced hardware and models, but lacks large-scale, real, and sufficiently rich human motion data. The team thus determined its direction: rather than directly manufacturing robots, it would provide robots with the data they need to learn about the real world.
Regarding the founding date, public reports differ somewhat. TechCrunch traces Mecka's founding to 2024, while Fortune says the four founders decided to officially launch Mecka AI in 2025 after accumulating a large amount of data in the earlier period. Therefore, 2024 can be understood as its early project exploration stage, while 2025 is the company launch stage described in reports.
In terms of funding, Mecka publicly completed an $8 million seed round in August 2025, led by Neo.
In June 2026, the company announced the completion of a total of $60 million in funding ($25 million Series A and $35 million in follow-on investment), led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, and others.
Four months later, Mecka secured another $60 million Series B funding round, with its investor lineup further expanding to include institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, and Microsoft's M12.
From Framework Ventures to Sequoia Capital, and then to strategic investors such as Nvidia and Microsoft, Mecka's funding lineup is no longer limited to the Crypto circle.
What is Mecka?
AI can write articles and generate code, but for robots to learn to serve coffee, fold clothes, and repair cars, a large amount of training is still required.
The reason is simple: language models can obtain massive amounts of text from the internet, but robots need to understand actions, force, contact, and spatial relationships in the real world. This information cannot be obtained directly from web pages.
What Mecka does is transform people's daily activities into training data that robots can use.
Its operating process is mainly divided into three steps.
The first is data collection. Mecka organizes people to use mobile phones or self-developed multi-sensor devices to record daily activities such as cooking, organizing items, and repairing cars.
The second is data processing. The company uses technologies such as computer vision and multimodal models to process raw video and sensor data, extracting content such as motion trajectories, hand poses, and three-dimensional spatial information.
The last is data delivery. Mecka provides the processed data to robotics labs, AI model teams, and enterprises for model training, evaluation, and actual robot deployment.
Mecka's core business model is B2B data and related services.
In August 2025, according to Upstarts, Mecka had disclosed that it had signed paid contracts with some Fortune 100 companies and listed the robotics company 1X Technologies as an early partner.
Currently, the company says it already provides services to multiple frontier robotics labs and several of the Magnificent Seven U.S. tech companies, but it has not published a complete customer list or specific contract amounts.
However, Mecka is no longer satisfied with only selling data.
In its latest funding announcement, the company also emphasized its robot commercial deployment business, including hardware integration, on-site data collection, model post-training, system integration, and subsequent operations and maintenance.
This means Mecka hopes to evolve from a training data supplier into a service provider for enterprises deploying robots.
The value of this model lies in the fact that Mecka can not only sell one-time data, but may also establish long-term cooperative relationships with customers through deployment and continuous operations.
Has Mecka downplayed Web3?
Compared with its current Physical AI positioning, Mecka's early Crypto flavor was much more pronounced.
In 2024, Mecka launched a points program inspired by the crypto industry. The early points also covered social tasks and simultaneously served a user growth function.
Regarding this experience, according to Upstarts, Mecka CEO Josh Gao once offered an explanation. Although this model helped the project gain attention in its early stages, it also brought trust issues to the company, especially when cooperating with large enterprises. CTO Jason Chong believed that if a company wants to collect millions of hours of video data of uneven quality, a Token mechanism might play a role; but if that scale of collection is not needed, it could also become a distraction.
Afterward, Mecka shifted to gamified daily tasks, allowing users to contribute data through activities such as making the bed. For enterprise-customized tasks, the company provides dedicated devices to screened data collectors to obtain higher-quality data.
So, does Mecka still give users points now? This cannot yet be confirmed.
In February 2026, Mecka launched a new iOS app on the Apple App Store. The company officially describes it as a first-person data recording tool for its internal robotics research lab, mainly used for data recording, uploading, and task management, with no public mention of points, Tokens, or airdrop mechanisms.
The author downloaded this app, but an Access Code is required upon entry, so it is temporarily impossible to view the internal tasks and reward rules, and therefore impossible to determine whether data providers currently receive points, cash, or other forms of compensation.
When the data business is proven, is a Token still needed?
Looking back at Mecka's development, what is most noteworthy is not whether it will issue a token, but how its data collection model has gradually integrated with enterprise needs.
The early points program solved the cold start problem: how to attract more ordinary users to participate and provide robots with large amounts of real-world data?
But the needs of commercial customers are more complex.For a robotics lab, the number of videos is not the only metric. Whether the data is accurate, whether the actions are complete, whether it can correspond to specific training tasks, and whether the collection quality is stable are equally important.
Therefore, open-ended points-based incentives and specialized paid data collection are not entirely the same business model.
The former is more likely to attract a large number of participants, while the latter is conducive to managing the collection process around specific customer needs. The two approaches can also coexist, and it is not easy to simply judge which one is necessarily more effective.
Mecka's early attempt at Crypto points, followed by a greater emphasis on enterprise-customized data and commercial deployment, can be seen as a process of its business model gradually becoming more focused.
And an annualized revenue run rate of more than $100 million at least indicates that the company claims its current business has already formed a revenue base of considerable scale. However, due to the lack of complete financial disclosure, outsiders still cannot judge its gross margin, profitability, and the sustainability of its growth.
Mecka's development also leaves the Crypto industry with a question worth pondering: if a project can ultimately rely on traditional commercial revenue to continuously pay data contributors and meet enterprises' data procurement needs, then is a Token still a necessity?
For Mecka, this question does not yet have a final answer.
But what is certain is that the points program that once attracted the attention of Crypto users is no longer the focus of its external promotion. In its place are robot training data, enterprise customers, commercial deployment, and an ever-growing revenue scale.