NVIDIA-backed Mecka AI once dabbled in Crypto rewards?

This robotics data company once aimed to start with Crypto rewards.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

A project that once attracted users to contribute data through Crypto-style rewards has now gained support from tech giants and investment firms such as Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, and Microsoft, with projected revenues of $300 million by the end of the year.

This project is Mecka AI.

On October 7, Mecka AI announced the completion of a $60 million Series B funding round, led by Sequoia Capital, with new investors including NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Qualcomm Ventures, and Samsung, while existing supporters Framework Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and startup incubator and VC Neo continued their support.

The company also disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate as of June 2026 has exceeded $100 million, with expectations to reach $300 million by the end of the year. It is important to note that this is the annualized revenue run rate announced by the company, not the actual revenue achieved for the year.

For the Crypto industry, Mecka is not a completely unfamiliar AI company. It not only has investors from the crypto sector, but its founding team also has a Crypto background. More notably, Mecka previously launched a rewards program with ties to the crypto industry, which led to speculation among users about its future token issuance.

However, today, Mecka's website and funding announcements hardly emphasize Web3, instead positioning itself as a Physical AI data infrastructure company.

What changes has Mecka undergone from Crypto rewards to robotics data business?

What is the background of Mecka?

The four main co-founders of Mecka are: Josh Gao (CEO), Jason Chong (CTO), Duy Nguyen (COO), and Mogen Cheng (CPO).

Interestingly, none of the four initially had a professional background in robotics research. CEO Josh Gao co-founded a restaurant software startup with Mogen Cheng and sold that business in 2023.

Co-founder and CTO Jason Chong is a familiar face in the Crypto industry; he founded the crypto payment startup Utopia Labs, which was later acquired by Coinbase. According to Fortune magazine, Duy Nguyen, who is responsible for operations, has experience in sneaker reselling, having earned millions of dollars through flipping sneakers.

Josh Gao admitted in a Fortune interview that the team members are not from the robotics industry. They gradually discovered a problem by reading research papers, visiting robotics labs, and communicating with researchers: the robotics industry has increasingly advanced hardware and models but lacks large-scale, real, and sufficiently rich human motion data. The team thus determined their direction: rather than directly manufacturing robots, they would provide the data needed for robots to learn about the real world.

Regarding the founding time, there are some discrepancies in public reports. TechCrunch traces the founding of Mecka back to 2024, while Fortune states that the four founders decided to officially launch Mecka AI in 2025 after accumulating a large amount of data in the early stages. Therefore, 2024 can be understood as its early project exploration phase, while 2025 is the company launch phase described in the reports.

In terms of funding, Mecka publicly completed an $8 million seed round in August 2025, led by Neo.

In June 2026, the company announced the completion of a total of $60 million in funding (with $25 million in Series A and $35 million in follow-on investment), led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, and others.

Four months later, Mecka secured another $60 million in Series B funding, expanding its investor lineup to include Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, and Microsoft’s M12.

From Framework Ventures to Sequoia Capital, and now to strategic investors like NVIDIA and Microsoft, Mecka's funding lineup is no longer limited to the Crypto circle.

What is Mecka?

AI can write articles and generate code, but teaching robots to serve coffee, fold clothes, and repair cars still requires extensive training.

The reason is simple: language models can access vast amounts of text from the internet, but robots need to understand actions, forces, contacts, and spatial relationships in the real world. This information cannot be directly obtained from web pages.

What Mecka does is convert human daily activities into training data that robots can use.

Its operational process mainly consists of three steps.

First is data collection. Mecka organizes personnel to use smartphones or self-developed multi-sensor devices to record daily activities such as cooking, organizing items, and repairing cars.

Then comes data processing. The company utilizes computer vision, multimodal models, and other technologies to process raw video and sensor data, extracting action trajectories, hand postures, three-dimensional spatial information, and more.

Finally, data delivery. Mecka provides the processed data to robotics labs, AI model teams, and enterprises for model training, evaluation, and actual robot deployment.

Mecka's core business model is B2B data and related services.

In August 2025, according to Upstarts, Mecka disclosed that it had signed paid contracts with some Fortune 100 companies and listed robotics company 1X Technologies as an early partner.

Currently, the company claims to have provided services to several cutting-edge robotics labs and several of the seven major tech companies in the U.S., but has not disclosed a complete client list or specific contract amounts.

However, Mecka is no longer satisfied with just selling data.

In the latest funding announcement, the company also emphasized its robotics commercial deployment business, including hardware integration, on-site data collection, model retraining, system integration, and subsequent operational maintenance.

This means Mecka hopes to evolve from a training data supplier to a service provider for enterprises deploying robots.

The value of this model lies in the fact that Mecka can not only sell one-time data but may also establish long-term partnerships with clients through deployment and ongoing operations.

Has Mecka downplayed Web3?

Compared to its current positioning as a Physical AI company, Mecka's early Crypto color was much more pronounced.

In 2024, Mecka launched a rewards program inspired by the crypto industry. The early rewards also covered social tasks, serving a user growth function.

Regarding this experience, according to Upstarts, Mecka CEO Josh Gao has provided an explanation. While this model helped the project gain attention in its early stages, it also brought trust issues for the company, especially when collaborating with large enterprises. CTO Jason Chong believes that if a company wants to collect millions of hours of video data with varying quality, a token mechanism might be useful; but if such a scale of collection is not needed, it could become a distraction.

Subsequently, Mecka shifted to gamifying daily tasks, allowing users to contribute data through activities like making their beds. For enterprise-customized tasks, the company provides specialized equipment to selected data collectors to obtain higher quality data.

So, does Mecka still issue rewards to users? This point remains unconfirmed.

In February 2026, Mecka launched a new iOS app on the Apple App Store, which the company described as a first-person data recording tool for internal robotics research labs, primarily for data recording, uploading, and task management, without publicly mentioning rewards, tokens, or airdrop mechanisms.

I downloaded the app, but upon entering, it requires an Access Code, so I cannot currently view internal tasks and reward rules, and thus cannot determine whether data providers currently receive rewards in the form of points, cash, or other forms of compensation.

Once the data business is running, is Token still needed?

Looking back at Mecka's development, the most noteworthy aspect is not whether it will issue tokens, but how its data collection model gradually aligns with enterprise needs.

The early rewards program addressed the cold start problem: how to attract more ordinary users to participate and provide a large amount of real-world data for robots?

However, the needs of commercial clients are more complex.

For robotics labs, the quantity of videos is not the only metric. Whether the data is accurate, whether the actions are complete, whether they correspond to specific training tasks, and whether the quality of collection is stable are equally important.

Therefore, open-ended reward incentives and specialized paid collection are not entirely the same business model.

The former is more likely to attract a large number of participants, while the latter is beneficial for managing the collection process around specific client needs. Both methods may coexist, and it cannot be simply judged which one is necessarily more effective.

Mecka's early attempts at Crypto rewards, followed by a greater emphasis on enterprise-customized data and commercial deployment, can be seen as a process of gradually focusing its business model.

And the annualized revenue run rate exceeding $100 million at least indicates that the company claims its current business has formed a substantial revenue base. However, due to the lack of complete financial disclosures, the outside world still cannot assess its gross margin, profitability, and growth sustainability.

Mecka's development also leaves the Crypto industry with a thought-provoking question: if a project can ultimately rely on traditional business revenue to continuously pay contributors and meet enterprise data procurement needs, is Token still a necessity?

For Mecka, this question does not yet have a final answer.

But it is certain that the rewards program that once attracted Crypto users' attention is no longer the focus of its external promotion. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to robotics training data, enterprise clients, commercial deployment, and the growing scale of revenue.