XDOF, a startup collecting robot training data, to be valued at $1.2 billion three months after emerging from stealth
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
The main bottleneck for robots is not hardware but examples of human movement, and unicorn companies are already growing out of collecting them.
XDOF records how human operators with sensors and via remote control perform household tasks, and sells this data to robot developers; physical robots have no equivalent of the internet-scale text that language models learn from. The company's annual revenue is approaching $50 million, with more than 20 customers; 8VC is leading talks on a Series B, and in June Thrive, a16z, Lux and Spark provided a $70 million Series A.
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