Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks so that humanoid and other robots can learn from real-world motion data, is nearing a new financing round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of roughly $500 million, according to two people familiar with the deal. TechCrunch did not learn the round’s precise size, and terms are not final. The company has not commented; Sequoia declined to comment. The raise would come about three months after Mecka announced a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.

The four co-founders — Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen — do not have robotics backgrounds; they previously built a restaurant fintech startup, and Chong joined Coinbase after it acquired his crypto exchange. The team concluded that the shortage of physical-world data, not model architecture, was the key bottleneck for general-purpose robots. Mecka’s name comes from “mecha,” a giant robot controlled by humans, and the company positions itself as doing for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, and similar human-data companies did for large language models. As of early June, Mecka projected ending 2026 at a $100 million annual run rate, Gao told Fortune. It has not publicly named customers, but the article notes many robotics companies and AI labs rely on egocentric real-world capture and teleoperation. Rivals in the space include XDOF, reportedly nearing a round at a $1.2 billion valuation, plus Scale AI and Micro1 expanding beyond LLMs.