Eka Robotics valued at $1.45 billion after $150 million Series A

The firm’s robot can pick up about 1,500 objects up to 1 kg each per hour and succeeds more than 95 % of the time, far outpacing the roughly 600‑object hourly rate a human can achieve. According to a16z partner Raghu Raguram, the system is already “exceeding superhuman performance for certain tasks.” The robot relies on a vision‑force‑action model trained in a physics simulator and a force‑sensitive gripper that costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles.

Eka says the model scales by generating thousands of hours of simulated experience in minutes, allowing rapid reinforcement‑learning training without massive video datasets. The company is testing the technology in secret pilots for pick‑and‑place and wire‑handling tasks, while acknowledging that long‑term reliability on real assembly lines remains an open challenge.