TechCrunch was unable to learn the total capital being raised or whether the valuation includes the new funding. The terms of the deal are not final and could still change.
XDOF and 8VC didn’t respond to our request for comment.
The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves, essentially acting as an outsourced data-supply chain for the robotics industry.
As a PhD student, Wu was studying how robots learn from large datasets. One big impediment to his research was the lack of “large-scale data to work with,” he told TechCrunch in June.
So he teamed up with Shentu on a project called GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that allows a human operator to control a robotic arm remotely in order to generate training data. Their work led to an influential paper in robotics.
That research formed the foundation for XDOF, which investors now describe as the Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, a reference to the data-labeling giants that helped fuel the AI boom. Unlike LLMs, which initially trained on the entirety of the internet, physical robots don’t have an equivalent real-world dataset to draw from, making data collection a critical bottleneck to building general-purpose machines.
To capture this data, XDOF combines remote robot teleoperation with human collectors who wear sensors to record everyday tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes.
The startup plans to hire and train teams of data collectors worldwide, including teleoperators who steer robots remotely and egocentric operators who wear body sensors to capture movement data.