Machenta has emerged from stealth having secured $40 million in the largest ever seed raise by a UK robotics startup.
The London-based company has built a new kind of robot foundation model that learns a task from one demonstration, with no further training.
Robots typically need hours or days of data collection and training to pick up a task, and cannot gain new skills without developers updating the model. Machenta said its model works across different robots, including humanoids, and can instantly learn tasks such as packing and tidying.
“Welcome to the era of Instant Robot Learning,” said CEO and Co-founder Edward Johns.
Machenta describes the idea this way: “Walk up to a robot. Show it once. Step back. Watch it come alive. And in that moment, the robot has learned a task instantly.”
Johns said teaching robots is now “so quick and easy, it feels like physical vibe coding”.
Johns is Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London. In 2020 he began building a research group dedicated to one-shot robot learning, and developed many of the early methods in the field. He has brought that team and six years of research into Machenta.
Co-founder and CTO Vitalis Vosylius was Johns’s PhD student at Imperial. There, he built the first generalist in-context learning models for robotics trained entirely in simulation: Implicit Graph Alignment (CoRL 2023) and Instant Policy (ICLR 2025). He was awarded Imperial’s PhD Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Robotics.
The round was co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. The capital will go towards developing the model further and hiring for Machenta’s new lab and office in King’s Cross, London.
Creandum Partner Kathi Wilhelm told Imperial College London that few robotics teams can show research that has repeatedly shifted what was thought possible. She said the founders worked on the problem for years before the company existed, and are drawing on hands-on experience rather than just a theory of how robots can learn.
Early access to the model is available through a waitlist on Machenta’s website.
