Machenta, an Imperial College London robotics spinout with 11 staff, has emerged from stealth with a $40m (about £30m) seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. The company says it is the largest seed round ever raised by a UK robotics start-up.
Machenta was founded in 2025 by Edward Johns, professor of robot learning at Imperial College London, and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius. The research behind it goes back six years to Johns's lab, where the question was whether a robot could pick up a new physical skill as quickly as a person.
The company is building a foundation model for robots: one large model, trained once, that can then be put to work on many tasks. Machenta says the model can carry out a task such as packaging, assembly or tidying after seeing it demonstrated only once or twice. Johns calls the approach "instant robot learning".
What sets the London company apart from its rivals is how it trains. The model is built entirely in simulation, using computer-generated environments, and Machenta says it has used no real-world data. Most of the sector takes the opposite route. Rivals collect hundreds or thousands of human demonstrations for each task, and several companies now pay contractors to film themselves at work to produce training footage.
The deal
The $40m round was co-led by Stockholm-based Creandum and New York's Union Square Ventures. Machenta has not disclosed other participants, its valuation or the stakes held by the lead investors. On a sterling basis the round is worth roughly £30.05m.
Creandum partner Kathi Wilhelm said the team had worked on the problem "long before there was a company around it". Union Square Ventures managing partner Rebecca Kaden pointed to the amount of capital the industry is spending on real-world data collection and task-by-task training, which Machenta's approach is designed to avoid.
The funds will go on hiring, more computing power and generating more simulated training data. The company is also moving into a new office and lab in King's Cross. It has not said how many people it plans to hire.
What comes next
Machenta describes itself as a research company and has no near-term plans to sell a commercial product. It says one model has learned everyday tasks on several different robots, including humanoids. It also acknowledges that precise movements and complex motions remain difficult.
The competition is well funded. US groups Physical Intelligence and FieldAI are working on general-purpose robot models, and Skild AI was valued at more than $14bn after a $1.4bn round led by SoftBank in January. Investor interest in the category is broad: global venture funding for physical AI reached $47.4bn across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, according to Crunchbase.
For Machenta's backers, the bet is that simulation can do most of the work that the rest of the industry is paying people to film.
Original source: Tech.eu — https://tech.eu/2026/10/27/london-robotics-startup-machenta-raises-40m-seed-investment/ (additional reporting: Tech Funding News — https://techfundingnews.com/machenta-40m-seed-creandum-usv-simulation-robot-learning/)
