The side that gets a price

Sequoia Capital is leading a new round in Mecka AI at a valuation of about $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the deal, three months after the startup raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures with Menlo Ventures, SV Angel and Kindred Ventures. The size of the new round is not known and the terms are not final.[1]

What the money is priced against is an archive of human movement. Mecka pays people to record themselves doing everyday tasks — making coffee, fixing cars — with body sensors and a smartphone, and sells the result as training data for humanoid robots. The company projects a $100 million annual run rate for the end of 2026, a figure co-founder Josh Gao gave when the previous round was announced. There is no published figure for what a person receives per session or per hour.[1]

The same gap, a second time

The gap turns up here for the second time. In an earlier column the step that shortened was programming while the step that stayed was a worker demonstrating and correcting the behaviour, so the disclosed ten-minute gain could not be credited to anyone until headcount and ownership of those behaviours were published. Mecka closes the first half of that question — the person doing the demonstration is the product, and the work is paid — and leaves the second half exactly where it was.[1], [2]

The four founders had no robotics background; they treated the shortage of physical-world data as the bottleneck holding general-purpose robots back and built the company around it. That ties the value of the recordings to the scarcity of the data rather than to the skill in any single task, which is one reason a valuation can rise while the rate for a single session stays unpublished. Capital rushing into robot training data could account for the same number on its own: another collector of real-world robot data was reported in the same week to be nearing a round at a $1.2 billion valuation.[1]

What would make this measurable?

One number would settle it. Mecka's next disclosure that carries a valuation will show whether a payment rate for the recordings appears beside it: an amount per session or per hour, for the people whose kitchens and driveways become the training set. Until that rate is published, the projected run rate and the valuation describe what the data is worth to buyers, and nothing describes what the work is worth to the person doing it.[1]