London robotics startup Machenta raises $40M seed investment

Machenta has come out of stealth with a $40 million seed round, and it says that makes this the biggest seed raised by a UK robotics company so far. The London startup was co-founded by Imperial College robotics professor Edward Johns and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius, and the round was led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures.

The pitch is simple to say and hard to pull off: teach robots physical work much faster than current methods allow. Johns describes the idea as “physical vibe coding,” because the model is meant to pick up a task immediately instead of requiring long training runs and repeated demonstrations.

The company says it trained the system in simulation, using computer-generated environments rather than real-world data. Once trained, it claims the model can get a robot to do different jobs straight away after seeing the task once, including packaging, assembling and tidying.

This has been years in the making. Johns says the work started six years ago at Imperial College London, where he was asking whether robots could learn new physical skills as quickly as humans do. Machenta says the money will go into scaling the technology and growing a team of around a dozen people in its King's Cross office.