Andreessen Horowitz · TechCrunch AI
TechCrunch was unable to learn the total capital being raised or whether the valuation includes the new funding
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XDOF and 8VC didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Key facts
- On the startup’s $70 million Series A in June, with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital
- XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024
- XDOF previously told TechCrunch that it is already working with 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs
- 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
Summary
Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, several people with knowledge of the deal said. XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024. TechCrunch was unable to learn the total capital being raised or whether the valuation includes the new funding. 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, acting as an outsourced data-supply chain for the robotics industry. As a PhD student, Wu was studying how robots learn from large datasets.