Robotics data infrastructure startup XDOF is in late-stage negotiations to secure a Series B funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, according to sources familiar with the matter. Founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu and Fred Shentu, the company emerged from stealth less than three months ago and previously raised a $70 million Series A in June from investors including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital.
The swift return to fundraising was driven by incoming VC interest following rapid commercial growth, with annualized revenue nearing $50 million across 20 customers. XDOF acts as an outsourced data supply chain for physical robotics by building pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems. The company utilizes a low-cost teleoperation system called GELLO alongside global teams wearing body sensors to gather egocentric real-world motion data.
To address the absence of a web-scale dataset for physical robotics, XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release a large-scale training dataset named ABC. By providing specialized data pipelines to frontier AI labs and hardware builders, XDOF aims to position itself as a core infrastructure provider for general-purpose robotics.
Why it matters
Real-world physical data collection is emerging as a high-value infrastructure bottleneck for general-purpose robotics.
Reaching $50M in annualized revenue within months demonstrates massive enterprise demand for outsourced robotics training pipelines.
Specialized data collection startups are securing mega-valuations by mirroring Scale AI’s model for physical hardware.
Source: techcrunch.com
