Machenta raises $40 million
London-based robotics startup Machenta, founded by Imperial College London researchers, has raised a $40 million seed round to build an AI model that can teach robots new physical tasks after seeing them performed just once. Venture capital firms Creandum and Union Square Ventures co-led the round.
Unlike rivals developing general-purpose AI models for robots, Machenta is training its model in computer-generated environments rather than collecting real-world data. The company said the model is trained in environments that mimic how objects move and interact, without using a single pixel of real-world data.
CEO and cofounder Edward Johns is also a professor at Imperial College. Johns and former Ph.D. student Vitalis Vosylius founded Machenta late last year after spending several years studying whether robots could learn new physical tasks as quickly as humans.
Machenta has 11 employees and remains focused on research, with no near-term plans to commercialize its technology. The company plans to use the funding to expand its team and train its model with more computing power and simulated data, aiming to teach robots more precise and complex tasks.
Johns said the company’s model can learn some tasks immediately, but more precise tasks and complex movements remain challenging.
