Machenta

Machenta comes out of Imperial College London’s Robot Learning Lab, led by Professor Edward Johns (CEO, who previously led robot learning at Dyson), with his former PhD student Vitalis Vosylius, first author of the Instant Policy research, and other lab colleagues; the company was incorporated in London in July 2025, after six years of research. It develops a foundation model pre-trained entirely on simulated data, with no real-world data or human demonstrations, which after a single demonstration performs the task and adapts to variations without further training; the team has shown the same model learning tasks such as packing and tidying across different robots, including humanoids. On October 27, 2026 it raised $40 million in a seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, described as the largest seed ever for a UK robotics startup, to scale the model and grow the team at its new King’s Cross office and lab. Customers and the commercial model have not been disclosed.