XDOF, a robotics data startup, is in late-stage talks for a Series B round at a $1.2 billion valuation, according to multiple sources.
The company, co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu and Fred Shentu in 2024, emerged from stealth less than three months ago.
TechCrunch previously reported on XDOF’s $70 million Series A in June, with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital.
The company wasn’t planning to raise again so soon after that round, but its rapid growth — with annualized revenue approaching $50 million — prompted VCs to approach it about a new round.
The terms of the deal are not final and could still change, according to the sources. XDOF and 8VC did not respond to requests for comment.
The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves, essentially acting as an outsourced data-supply chain for the robotics industry.
"One big impediment to my research was the lack of large-scale data to work with," said Philipp Wu, CEO of XDOF, in a June interview with TechCrunch.
His work on GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system, led to an influential robotics paper and formed the foundation for XDOF. Investors now describe the company as the Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, a reference to the data-labeling giants that helped fuel the AI boom.
Unlike LLMs, which initially trained on the entirety of the internet, physical robots don’t have an equivalent real-world dataset to draw from, making data collection a critical bottleneck to building general-purpose machines.
XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release what it believes is the largest collection of high-quality robot training data ever assembled, dubbed ABC. To capture this data, XDOF combines remote robot teleoperation with human collectors who wear sensors to record everyday tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes.
The startup plans to hire and train teams of data collectors worldwide, including teleoperators who steer robots remotely and egocentric operators who wear body sensors to capture movement data.
XDOF previously told TechCrunch that it is already working with 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs.
Other startups attempting to collect real-world data for robot training include Mecka AI, as well as human-data platforms expanding beyond LLMs, such as Scale AI and Micro1.
XDOF did not say how much capital it is raising or whether the valuation includes the new funding. The company also did not clarify the open question of how it plans to scale its operations globally. The startup aims to continue expanding its data collection efforts and partnerships in the robotics industry.
Source: techcrunch
