Machenta, a robot-learning start-up built on Imperial College research, raises a $40m seed round to teach robots a new task from one demonstration

Machenta has raised $40m in seed funding led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, Imperial College London said on 27 October. Imperial calls it “the largest ever seed raise by a UK robotics startup”. Edward Johns, Imperial's professor of robot learning, is co-founder and chief executive. The money will scale the company's model and pay for a new office and lab in King's Cross.

In a post the same day, Machenta says its model is pretrained entirely in simulation and then uses one real demonstration and live camera views to do a new task, with no fine-tuning. “We call this the vision-demo-action model (VDA).” The company says one model runs on six different robots, and reports 74 of 74 block placements, 78 of 78 screwdriver handovers and 97 of 99 attempts at standing a bottle upright in hour-long unattended runs. These are simple tasks the company chose itself, and no outside test or customer is cited.

Johns says: “Humans don’t need to see the same thing over and over before they can do it.” Machenta's post says the work draws on six years of research on one-shot learning at Imperial.

The round comes a week after Eka Robotics raised $150m for its own robot model. Investors keep paying for robot “brains” that promise to cut the real-world data robots need.

• Confirmed A $40m seed round led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, which Imperial calls the largest ever seed raise by a UK robotics start-up. Imperial College London
• Claimed One model runs on six robots, with 74 of 74, 78 of 78 and 97 of 99 successes on three tasks in hour-long runs. Machenta