Data is the oil of the AI boom—and the startup Mecka AI hopes to tap the vast reservoir of hand gestures, walking gaits, and immense collection of humanity’s physical motions to better train our future overlords: robots.
Still, Josh Gao, Mecka AI’s cofounder and CEO, believes that his startup is a first mover—and his investors believe he has a chance to strike it big. Headquartered in New York City, the company has raised a total of $60 million across two previously unannounced fundraises: a $25 million Series A round closed in November and $35 million in a follow-on investment. Gao declined to tell me at what valuation he raised the capital.
“Many folks are now looking and realizing that robotics is going to be one of the most important waves that’s happening,” Gao said on a video call from the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where he was visiting a factory that was producing custom equipment his startup designed to capture human data.
Rather than focus on fintech, the founding quartet, who knew each other through mutual friends, decided to look at where the puck was going and zeroed in on AI for robots. “Can you have general intelligence in the physical world?” asked Gao.
They spent months devouring research papers, visiting robotics labs, and messaging roboticists on social media. Soon, they landed on what Gao said was an unconventional hypothesis: Train robots on data collected from humans, not from data collected through “teleoperation,” or when humans manually operate a robot.
That idea was mainly explored in research papers, Gao said, but his team partnered with robotics labs to show that it could work at scale. “Nobody really popularly believed this would be possible,” he said.
In 2025, after collecting thousands upon thousands of gigabytes of data, the four cofounders decided that they had enough traction to start Mecka AI. Gao and his cofounders use different methods of collecting data from humans, including custom hardware like body sensors as well as iPhones. There’s real demand, said Gao, adding that Mecka AI projects an annual run rate of $100 million based on already-signed contracts. (He declined to name Mecka AI’s customers.)
“I mean, this is the fastest-growing revenue company that we’ve ever invested in, so the proof is in the business itself,” Vance Spencer, cofounder of Framework Ventures, told me.
But, Gao, whose startup now has 40 employees, doesn’t envision Mecka AI as merely a data aggregator. He wants his company to be on the frontlines, personally helping firms integrate and train robotics models. “Useful robots can be deployed today,” Gao declared, “and immediately.”
See you tomorrow,
