Imperial AI spinout Machenta raises $40 million to make robots instant learners
Imperial AI spinout Machenta raises $40 million to make robots instant learners
Machenta, an AI spinout from Imperial College London, has raised $40 million in seed funding to develop a new type of robot foundation model that allows robots to learn new tasks instantly from a single demonstration. The company's technology, based on simulated data pre-training, aims to make robot learning more scalable and reduce dependency on human data.
Machenta's approach represents a significant shift in robot learning by enabling instant task acquisition through single demonstrations, leveraging simulated data for pre-training and reducing reliance on human data collection.
Source: Robotics — Robot learning news discovery · Read original article ↗
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Imperial AI spinout Machenta raises $40 million to make robots instant learners
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A physical AI spinout from Imperial College London has secured record-breaking seed funding to develop a new kind of robot foundation model building on the founders’ research at Imperial. Machenta has raised $40 million in the largest ever seed raise by a UK robotics startup. The funding round led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures will help the company scale an AI model that enables robots to learn new tasks inst
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London Today’s AI-powered robots typically need to be trained through humans demonstrating individual tasks many times, often taking days. This yields robots capable of certain tasks but which cannot gain new skills without laborious model updates by developers. Using a breakthrough AI model developed by Machenta, robots can now learn new tasks from just a single demonstration. The company’s technology could eventual
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ssor Johns and his team at the Robot Learning Lab began investigating whether a robot could one day learn new physical skills as quickly as a human. After the techniques developed in his lab began to show strong potential, Professor Johns and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius founded Machenta with colleagues from their lab to scale this work. The team has recently shown how a single model can instantly learn diverse t
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asks such as packing and tidying, across any robot including humanoid robots. "Very few teams in robotics can point to a body of work like this, which has repeatedly changed what people thought was possible,” said Kathi Wilhelm, Partner at Creandum. “The team at Machenta has spent years breaking through this extremely hard problem, long before there was a company around it. They’re not starting with just a theory of
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how robots can learn like humans; they’re building on years of experience actually making it happen.” Senior leaders at Imperial College London say that the UK has potential to become a pioneer in AI-powered robotics bringing the expertise and infrastructure provided by universities together with the deployment pathways provided by industry. Professor Mary Ryan , Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial Col
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lege London, said: “Machenta’s technology, and the vote of confidence it has received from investors, is testament to the quality of the research by Ed and his Robot Learning Lab. Machenta’s early success signals an opportunity for the UK to become a global leader in AI-enabled robotics, drawing on the specialist capabilities of universities like Imperial – and you can expect to see a growing stream of game-changing
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Source：Robotics — Robot learning news discovery · imperial.ac.uk