Eka Robotics, a robotics company, has completed a $150 million Series A funding round at a valuation of $1.45 billion.

PANews October 21 news, according to TechCrunch, robotics startup Eka Robotics has completed a $150 million Series A funding round at a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion, led by a16z and F-Prime. The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, and develops force-sensitive grippers and a "vision-force-action" model, relying mainly on physics simulation for reinforcement learning training. Eka says its robots can grasp about 1,500 items weighing under 1 kilogram per hour (humans about 600), with a success rate exceeding 95%. The gripper costs less than $1,000 and has a rated lifespan of 5 million cycles. The company is piloting pick-and-place and cable-handling operations with multiple industrial customers.