UAE Digital
Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF—a startup founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024—is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B funding round at a valuation of approximately $1.2 billion. Led by 8VC, the deal follows TechCrunch’s report on XDOF’s $70 million Series A in June, which included participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, and Spark Capital. Despite not planning another round immediately after the Series A, XDOF’s rapid growth—with annualized revenue nearing $50 million—has prompted VCs to reconsider.
The company aims to build data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for frontier AI labs and robotics companies, acting as an outsourced data-supply chain. XDOF’s solution addresses a critical bottleneck: physical robots lack large-scale real-world datasets like those used by large language models (LLMs). Founded on research by Wu, who studied robot learning, XDOF’s GELLO system enables human operators to remotely control robotic arms to generate training data.
Their work led to an influential robotics paper. XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release ABC, the largest collection of high-quality robot training data, combining teleoperation with sensor-equipped human collectors for tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes. The startup plans to hire and train global teams of data collectors, including teleoperators and egocentric operators.
XDOF already works with 20 customers, including frontier AI labs. Competitors like Mecka AI and human-data platforms (e.g., Scale AI, Micro1) also collect real-world data for robot training.
Source: TechCrunch
