XDOF, just three months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation

Lower than three months after rising from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation knowledge for coaching general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to lift a Sequence B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, a number of individuals with information of the deal stated.

XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024. TechCrunch reported on the startup’s $70 million Series A in June, with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital. XDOF wasn’t planning to lift once more so quickly after that spherical. However the firm’s fast development — with annualized income approaching $50 million — prompted VCs to strategy it a couple of new spherical, the individuals stated.

TechCrunch was unable to study the full capital being raised or whether or not the valuation contains the brand new funding. The phrases of the deal should not remaining and will nonetheless change.

XDOF and 8VC didn’t reply to our request for remark.

The startup goals to construct the information pipelines, assortment instruments, and annotation programs that frontier AI labs and robotics firms can’t simply construct themselves, basically performing as an outsourced data-supply chain for the robotics business.

As a PhD scholar, Wu was learning how robots study from massive datasets. One large obstacle to his analysis was the dearth of “large-scale knowledge to work with,” he instructed TechCrunch in June.

So he teamed up with Shentu on a undertaking referred to as GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that permits a human operator to regulate a robotic arm remotely with a purpose to generate coaching knowledge. Their work led to an influential paper in robotics.

That analysis fashioned the muse for XDOF, which traders now describe because the Scale AI or Mercor for bodily robotics, a reference to the data-labeling giants that helped gas the AI increase. In contrast to LLMs, which initially educated on the whole lot of the web, bodily robots don’t have an equal real-world dataset to attract from, making knowledge assortment a essential bottleneck to constructing general-purpose machines.

XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Analysis lab to launch what it believes is the most important assortment of high-quality robotic coaching knowledge ever assembled, dubbed ABC. 

To seize this knowledge, XDOF combines distant robotic teleoperation with human collectors who put on sensors to document on a regular basis duties like folding garments and flattening packing containers.

The startup plans to rent and practice groups of knowledge collectors worldwide, together with teleoperators who steer robots remotely and selfish operators who put on physique sensors to seize motion knowledge.  

XDOF beforehand instructed TechCrunch that it’s already working with 20 clients, together with a number of frontier AI labs.

Different startups making an attempt to gather real-world knowledge for robotic coaching embody Mecka AI, in addition to human-data platforms increasing past LLMs, similar to Scale AI and Micro1.