London-based robotics startup Machenta has come out of stealth with a $40 million in a seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, with several angel investors also taking part. The company says it is the largest seed round ever raised by a UK robotics company.
- Machenta was founded by Edward Johns, Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London, and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius. The startup is building a robot foundation model designed to make teaching robots fast and simple, which it calls “Instant Robot Learning.”
- Teaching a robot a new task usually takes hours or days of data collection and training. Machenta’s model can learn a task from a single demonstration and needs no further training. Once it has seen a task done once, it can guide a robot through jobs such as packaging, assembling and tidying.
- The model was trained entirely in simulation using computer-generated environments, without any real-world data. Johns compares the experience to “physical vibe coding.”
- The work behind Machenta started six years ago at Imperial College London, where Johns set out to answer one question: could a robot ever learn new physical skills as quickly as a human?
“Intelligence is not so much about what you can already do, it’s about how quickly you can learn to do something new. Humans don’t need to see the same thing over and over before they can do it. If you take some objects, and show somebody what to do with them, they’ll probably then be able to do the same task immediately. We’ve spent years trying to understand what it would take for robots to learn at the speed of a human. That is what instant robot learning is about,” said Edward Johns, co-founder of Machenta.
- Machenta will use the funding to scale its technology and grow its team, which currently has around 12 people, at its office in London’s King’s Cross.
