๐จ BREAKING:
@Machenta_ just raised $40M in seed funding, the largest robotics seed round ever raised in the UK. ๐ฌ๐ง
Founded by
@Ed__Johns,
@vitalisvos19 and the team that spent years developing this concept at Imperial College London.
The round was co-led by
@creandum and
@usv, and many other amazing parties
The technology theyโre launching is called Instant Robot Learning.
A robot foundation model trained entirely in simulation. Zero real-world training data required.
Teach a robot a new manipulation task in a minute. Not hours. Not days. One minute! ๐คฏ
The robot in the demo needs to pass a shoe between its hands twice to flip it the right way around, a creative, multi-step manipulation sequence.
The team didnโt pre-program it. They just tried things out until it worked.
Ed describes it as โphysical vibe coding.โ
It signals something genuinely new about the development experience. When teaching a robot takes minutes instead of weeks, you can iterate, experiment and get creative with behaviours the way a software engineer iterates on code.ย
The barrier between idea and physical execution collapses drastically.
The underlying insight is powerful. If you can generate enough high-quality simulation data and close the sim-to-real gap tightly enough, you never need to touch real hardware during training at all.
Every robot deployment starts from the same foundation. Every new task is a prompt, not a project.
Imperial College London research. $40M seed. UK record.
The British are very much in the robot learning race. ๐ฌ๐ง
Proud to back another outstanding physical AI company as an angel investor among so many awesome investors! ๐
๐ Learn more about it in their blog:
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