XDOF in talks for Series B at $1.2B valuation, three months after leaving stealth
The robot teleoperation data startup is in late-stage talks for a round led by 8VC, with annualized revenue approaching $50 million.
XDOF, a startup collecting real-world teleoperation data to train general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks for a Series B at a valuation of roughly $1.2 billion, led by 8VC, according to people with knowledge of the deal cited by TechCrunch. The total amount being raised, and whether the valuation includes the new money, could not be learned. Terms are not final.
The company was founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO). In June it announced a $70 million Series A with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux and Spark Capital. XDOF was not planning to raise again this soon, the people said, but annualized revenue approaching $50 million prompted investors to approach the company.
A data supply chain for robotics
XDOF builds the data pipelines, collection tools and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies struggle to build in house, effectively serving as an outsourced data supply chain for the industry. Investors describe it as the Scale AI or Mercor of physical robotics. Unlike large language models, which trained on the internet at large, robots have no equivalent real-world dataset, making data collection a bottleneck for general-purpose machines.
The foundation was GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system Wu and Shentu built that lets a human operator steer a robotic arm remotely to generate training data. The project produced an influential robotics paper. XDOF is now working with UC Berkeley's AI Research lab to release ABC, which it says is the largest collection of high-quality robot training data assembled so far.
Data comes from remote teleoperation combined with human collectors wearing sensors while performing everyday tasks such as folding clothes and flattening boxes. The company plans to hire and train collection teams worldwide, including teleoperators and egocentric operators recording movement data. XDOF has said it already works with 20 customers, several of them frontier AI labs. Rivals include Mecka AI, plus human-data platforms such as Scale AI and Micro1.
Full report at TechCrunch.
