🚨 BREAKING: @EkaRobotics just raised $150M in Series A funding at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime Capital. The founding team is exceptional. @pulkitology is an MIT professor. Tuomas Haarnoja is a former DeepMind researcher, the person behind Soft Actor-Critic, one of the most influential reinforcement learning algorithms of the last decade. Eka is not building a VLA, Vision-Language-Action model, like almost everyone else in the field. They’re building a Vision-Force-Action architecture. The difference matters enormously. Force is the missing variable. Most robot manipulation models see the world through cameras and predict actions. Eka’s architecture pairs vision with a force-sensitive gripper, the robot feels what it touches and uses that signal as part of the control loop. One roboticist compared the demo to the moment robots first achieved reliable legged locomotion. The training approach combines simulation and reinforcement learning, the same paradigm that cracked locomotion and is now being applied to dexterous manipulation. Force feedback. Sim-to-real RL. MIT and DeepMind pedigree. a16z and F-Prime conviction. This is one of the most interesting manipulation companies to emerge this year. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com