Funding
Imperial spinout Machenta raises $40 million seed round for robots that learn a task from one demonstration
Short answer: Machenta, a robotics AI start-up spun out of Imperial College London, has raised a $40 million seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, Imperial announced on 27 October 2026. Imperial describes it as the largest seed round raised by a UK robotics start-up. Machenta is building a robot foundation model that it says can learn a new physical task from a single demonstration.
The company was founded by Edward Johns, Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial, who is chief executive, and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius, together with colleagues from Imperial's Robot Learning Lab, where the underlying research began about six years ago. According to Imperial, the team has shown a single model learning varied tasks such as packing and tidying across different robots, including humanoid robots. Tech.eu reported that Johns likens the approach to "physical vibe coding".
A key difference from many current robot models, according to the company, is that Machenta's model is pre-trained entirely on simulated data rather than large collections of real-world human demonstrations. Imperial says this could help developers avoid the practical and privacy limits of gathering large amounts of human data. Tech.eu reported that the team numbers around a dozen people.
Machenta plans to use the money to scale its model and grow its team at a new office and lab in King's Cross, London, Imperial said. The valuation was not disclosed in the announcements we reviewed. For other recent humanoid funding news, see our funding and policy hub and our report on Eka Robotics' Series A.