Imperial robotics AI spinout Machenta breaks seed funding record raising £40 million

Machenta, an Imperial spinout focused on the field of Instant Robot Learning, has raised £40 million in seed funding, the most ever by a UK robotics startup. This funding round was created by early Spotify backer VC firm Creandum and Union Square Ventures, who have also backed major tech startups like Etsy or Duolingo. 

Like for humans, intelligence for robots doesn’t mean knowing as much as it does being able to learn quickly and independently. This means robots could ideally recognise and recover from mistakes, react, and swiftly adapt to changing conditions and challenges, known as instant robot learning. Machenta claims its AI model allows robots to learn a task after it is shown it just once, a significant change from robots that have to be trained for hours or days. The company says a single model has already learned varied tasks such as packing and tidying across different robots, including humanoids.

An AI model now allows robots to learn a physical task after they are shown it once

The training approach also differs from the norm. Instead of relying on large real-world datasets of human demonstrations, Machenta’s model is trained only on simulated data, which could pose an advantage when considering privacy constraints of collecting human data at scale. 

Machenta’s work began six years ago at Imperial, researching an answer to how far we can mimic human learning processes for physical skills onto robots. The company was developed by Founder & CEO Professor Edward Johns and his team, who work at the Robot Learning Lab based in Imperial’s Department of Computing. 

This new funding is expected to be used to scale this artificial intelligence model, as well as to expand the company to a new office space in King’s Cross.