🚨 BREAKING:
@Machenta_ just raised $40M in seed funding, the largest robotics seed round ever raised in the UK. 🇬🇧
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 they’re 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! 🤯
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 didn’t pre-program it. They just tried things out until it worked.
Ed describes it as “physical vibe coding.”
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.
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. 🇬🇧
Proud to back another outstanding physical AI company as an angel investor among so many awesome investors! 😇
🔗 Learn more about it in their blog:
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