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XDOF, just three months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation

42 min ago

XDOF, a startup building real-world teleoperation data pipelines for general-purpose robot training, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a roughly $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, just three months after emerging from stealth, sources told TechCrunch. Co-founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO), XDOF raised a $70 million Series A in June from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital. The company wasn’t planning another round so soon, but rapid growth—with annualized revenue approaching $50 million—prompted VC interest. Terms are not final and could change; XDOF and 8VC declined comment. XDOF acts as an outsourced data-supply chain for robotics, providing collection tools, annotation systems, and large-scale training data that frontier AI labs and robotics companies struggle to build internally. Wu’s PhD research on robot learning from large datasets was hindered by a lack of real-world data, leading to the GELLO teleoperation system—a low-cost remote control for robotic arms that generates training data. That work produced an influential robotics paper and formed XDOF’s foundation. Investors now compare XDOF to Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, referencing the data-labeling giants that fueled the AI boom. Unlike LLMs trained on internet text, physical robots lack an equivalent real-world dataset, making data collection a critical bottleneck. XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release ABC, what it calls the largest high-quality robot training dataset ever assembled. Data is captured via remote robot teleoperation and human collectors wearing sensors to record everyday tasks like folding clothes. The startup plans to hire and train global teams of teleoperators and egocentric operators. XDOF previously told TechCrunch it works with 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs. Competitors include Mecka AI and human-data platforms like Scale AI and Micro1 expanding beyond LLMs.