E14 Fund retweeted
Eka Robotics CEO @pulkitology predicts almost nothing will change for consumers in robotics over the next year:
"For the general audience, nothing is going to change. We’re going to see a lot and lot of video demos, but demos are a whole different thing than robots working in production."
"Maybe if you are in the Bay Area, there are pilots happening where you can get a humanoid to come in your home and try out things."
"I expect a lot of adoption happening in industries, where machine learning-based robotics is actually proving that it can work for actual automation in real-world scenarios."
"My prediction is a boring one, that automation will happen in factories, not in homes."
@EkaRobotics
E14 Fund retweeted
We believe solving dexterous manipulation is one of the largest opportunities in robotics. That’s why we're thrilled to lead Eka Robotics’ Series A.
Much of the world's physical economy still depends on people using their hands, and that work has been hard to automate because the real world is variable.
@EkaRobotics has built a Vision-Force-Action model that combines visual perception with force feedback from its robotic hands. The model, sensing, and hardware are designed together, so the robot can use physical contact itself as information.
If Eka’s approach works at scale, the implication is profound: robot experience can increasingly scale with compute rather than human labor.
Pulkit Agrawal is one of the leading researchers in robot learning and a pioneer in computational sensorimotor learning through work at his Improbable AI Lab at MIT CSAIL. Tuomas Haarnoja co-created a foundational algorithms in modern reinforcement learning at Berkeley and later worked at Google DeepMind training complex humanoid behaviors.
Congrats, @pulkitology, @haarnoja, and the Eka Robotics team!
By @stuffyokodraws and @RaghuRaghuram
E14 Fund retweeted
Congrats to @ornith_ on releasing Ornith-1.5-122B! We trained a DFlash 2 drafter for day-0 support.
It speeds up its generation by up to 3×, and it's lossless!
huggingface.co/incoai/Ornith…
Aloha!🌺 Meet Ornith-1.5-122B: No Tradeoff Between Strong and Fast
Stronger. Faster. Leaner. Ornith-1.5-122B delivers frontier-level capabilities with exceptional inference efficiency. With superior instruction following, stronger task decomposition, and deeper understanding of real-world workflows, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size, while running on a single NVIDIA DGX card!!
Open weights under the MIT license.
Coding
✅SWE-bench Verified: 0.845
✅TB2.1: 0.813
✅CyberGym: 0.800
✅NL2Repo: 0.512
Agentic
✅HLE: 0.446
✅BrowseComp: 0.785
✅MCP-Atlas: 0.746
✅Toolathlon: 0.708
🤗Hugging Face: huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Orn…
We can’t wait to see what you build with Ornith-1.5-122B.
You've never seen robots as performant, as reliable and as useful as this....
@EkaRobotics has raised a $150M Series A.
Generality v/s Performance is the fundamental tension at the frontier of robotics. Generality without performance is just a prototype. Performance without generality is just a single-purpose tool.
Customers shouldn’t have to choose. Eka breaks the tradeoff. Powered by our Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, we deliver the performance and versatility customers need to put robots to work every day.
Eka is built on three convictions:
⚡️Force is the language of manipulation.
🚀 Reinforcement learning is how dexterous manipulation scales.
🎂 System 1—fast, reliable physical execution—is the bottleneck to solve.
With this funding, we will scale our model and accelerate customer deployments.
Grateful to be building alongside a dream team and investors who share our ambition.
E14 Fund retweeted
Manipulation gets solved by feeling; vision isn't as important as you think! A leap in the last mm manipulation that holds back general-purpose robotics 👇
Every robot already carries contact sensors: its own joints. When a robot touches something, its joints drift slightly off their commands, and the encoders pick it up. Legged robots and humanoids already leverage this signal to walk blind - but is it enough for blind precise assembly?
We find that it is! Our policies can insert pegs, mesh gears, and thread nuts using only the robot's joint positions - no camera, no tactile, and no object poses. And the peg policy works zero-shot in the real world! 🧵
w/ my amazing co-first author @younghyo_park, and advised by @kushalk_ and @pulkitology.
Huge congrats Andrew and team on launching Glimpse and bringing Visual thinking to life!
E14 Fund retweeted
How can a collective of agents make meaningful progress toward new protein designs? Or close the loop from simulated alloy to printed part in a weekend?
We’re excited to be providing tools and judging at the upcoming ScienceClaw hackathon, hosted by @medialab and @e14fund. Oct 30 – Nov 1 at MIT.
Every team gets access to OpenResearch, and the best use of it wins $500 in GPU credits!
Early apps close tomorrow (10/16) 👇
scienceclawhack.ai/apply.htm…
E14 Fund retweeted
@e14fund does it again! Another great event for the books. A room full of founders, top-notch researchers and builders.
E14 Fund retweeted
New @ThePeelPod with @bznotes!
Bilal's spent 18 years investing hard tech, most of it as a GP at Lux ($7B AUM), before starting @RedGlassVC in 2025 to bet on AI that touches the physical world.
Bilal was making defense tech investments 15 years ago, and he led the Series A in Applied Intuition, now a $15 billion company.
We hung out for a few hours and he shared everything he's learned investing in hardware, why hardware is still hard, why the deployment layer is the most attractive area of physical AI, taking a 90% pay cut to start Red Glass, "AUM as a moat", how to become a billionaire off management fees, and why consensus investing is mostly a circle jerk.
Full episode here + links below
Timestamps
0:00 Leaving $7B to bet on physical AI
0:51 What most people get wrong in physical AI
4:17 Why a startup has to become a business
11:31 Hardware is still hard, so what changed?
15:40 How government went from SBIR mills to real customer
17:48 Robotics goes from hard-coded to probabilistic
23:34 Where value accrues: full stack, then wedges
25:24 How Applied Intuition became a $15B company
28:03 The deployment layer is the real prize
32:22 OpenAI and Anthropic hint what will happen in physical AI
36:14 Why customers have all the downside
37:56 The best founders paint a picture and execute
40:53 Why it's called Red Glass (founders chew glass)
42:17 Every founder hates fundraising, even Travis
44:29 Red Glass's four core values
50:49 Why founders really take your call (the $250k effect)
53:28 What Bilal looks for in a founder
58:44 Why technical founders underrate fundraising
1:00:26 The Tiger Global era
1:04:02 From $10B to $100B, the goalposts moved
1:06:21 Is this a bubble? Portfolio construction
1:08:55 Building a firm that outlasts him
1:12:13 From Nobel-lab chemist to Zero-to-One investor
1:13:45 Are small funds just outsourced associates?
1:16:35 When AUM becomes the moat
1:18:34 How big funds choke off SPV money
1:21:24 The risk of VCs backing competitors
1:23:31 Why fund economics push everyone bigger
1:26:20 Consensus investing is a circle jerk
1:29:51 You can be a billionaire on fees alone
1:33:09 Equal carry and the right to win
1:35:55 Why good ethics in VC matter
E14 Fund retweeted
Had a great time reconnecting with the @MIT and @e14fund community and talking about the future of AI
Great to see @Physion_Labs represented at @MIT alongside @hanrui_w and @LLiebenwein for a conversation on where AI infrastructure is headed and what remains hard to build.
Thank you to @e14fund, @c10n, and Habib Haddad for bringing together founders, researchers, and students for the discussion. We’re excited to keep pushing the frontier of AI infrastructure and world understanding — and to meet the next generation of researchers and builders along the way 🚀🚀🚀
E14 Fund retweeted
Together with @e14fund, we are hosting a bar social at @COLM_conf on Thursday at 8:30pm, featuring our recent project releases: Software World and Context Language Model!
github.com/facebookresearch/…
theagentorg.app/
Looking forward to seeing you tmr! luma.com/e14events-os4c
E14 Fund retweeted
We're growing our SF team. Join us and build the frontier of multimodal inference at Nunchux AI.
Engineering
✦ Product Engineer
✦ ML Engineer, Visual Generative Models
✦ ML Engineer, Model Integrations
GTM
✦ Founding Marketer
✦ Founding GTM
nunchux.ai/careers
E14 Fund retweeted
ScienceClaw Hackathon @MIT @e14fund @medialab: October 30-November 1, 2026 at MIT; early applications close October 16, 2026, decisions sent by October 19. Apply: scienceclawhack.ai/apply.htm…
Applications will be reviewed based on:
▶️ Problem: Is the proposed problem meaningful and sufficiently challenging?
▶️ Approach: Is there a compelling reason to use a decentralized, multi-agent system?
▶️ Experience: Does the applicant/team have relevant technical, scientific, or research experience?
▶️ Team / skills: Does the team have the skills needed to make meaningful progress, or a clear plan to find complementary collaborators?
We will provide access to a shared pool of resources, including compute, models, tools, and other infrastructure, where available. Resources are limited and will be allocated based on project needs, technical fit, and availability.
Spend a weekend at @MIT for the ScienceClaw Hackathon - Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2026: Exploring the collective dynamics of AI for science to solve real-world science and technology problems across scales.
E14 Fund retweeted
Please share widely, especially to researchers in disaster and war zones.
Proud to launch the 2nd round of the Max Planck @maxplanckpress mentoring program for researchers (including students) at risk due to natural disaster or war.
Deadline 18 October.
maxminds.mpg.de/3630/apply
E14 Fund retweeted
Spend a weekend at @MIT for the ScienceClaw Hackathon - Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2026: Exploring the collective dynamics of AI for science to solve real-world science and technology problems across scales.
Join us at the MIT Media Lab for the ScienceClaw Hackathon, building the internet of agents for science. AI is becoming a collaborator in the real world - designing materials, creating instruments, running experiments, and connecting its capabilities with those of other agents. AI adapts as a problem unfolds - revising its reasoning, learning how to collaborate, and assembling scattered pieces of knowledge, evidence, and raw capability into solutions to some of the hardest challenges in science, technology, and innovation.
Teams will connect AI agents, models, simulations, robots, cloud labs, and scientific tools into functioning systems to tackle problems in protein design, robotics, materials, manufacturing, experimental science, and beyond.
The challenge is to turn ideas into tested results - and demonstrate how agents collaborating across teams and disciplines can accomplish more together. Explore how agents can specialize, challenge one another’s assumptions, learn from failed experiments, and combine their expertise to solve harder problems. Show how collaboration changes what your system can discover, design, or build.
One agent's discovery becomes another's starting point. A tool built by one team enables an experiment by another. Connect your team of AIs, share a capability someone else needs, and build on what others have learned, produced, built. The ambition is an internet of agents through which scientific knowledge, tools, and capabilities can grow, evolve and be utilized across teams and institutions.
🗓️ When: October 30-November 1, 2026
📍 Where: MIT Media Lab
Bring your expertise, your tools, and a problem worth solving - or find one. Help build AI that can contribute to science through what it can discover, create, and make work.
Join us at MIT for the first ScienceClaw Hackathon... Apply at scienceclawhack.ai/
Spend a weekend at @MIT for the ScienceClaw Hackathon - Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2026: Exploring the collective dynamics of AI for science to solve real-world science and technology problems across scales.
E14 Fund retweeted
Taking humanoid soccer out of the lab: no instrumentation, no controlled environment. Real fields, around people.
Trained in simulation. Deployed in reality.
No post-training. Just pre-training.
Dribbling. Passing. Turning. Scoring goals.
Work led by Avi, Khai, @nolan_fey along with @martinpeticco @JohnMarangola, and Venki.
E14 Fund retweeted
Join us at the MIT Media Lab for the ScienceClaw Hackathon, building the internet of agents for science. AI is becoming a collaborator in the real world - designing materials, creating instruments, running experiments, and connecting its capabilities with those of other agents. AI adapts as a problem unfolds - revising its reasoning, learning how to collaborate, and assembling scattered pieces of knowledge, evidence, and raw capability into solutions to some of the hardest challenges in science, technology, and innovation.
Teams will connect AI agents, models, simulations, robots, cloud labs, and scientific tools into functioning systems to tackle problems in protein design, robotics, materials, manufacturing, experimental science, and beyond.
The challenge is to turn ideas into tested results - and demonstrate how agents collaborating across teams and disciplines can accomplish more together. Explore how agents can specialize, challenge one another’s assumptions, learn from failed experiments, and combine their expertise to solve harder problems. Show how collaboration changes what your system can discover, design, or build.
One agent's discovery becomes another's starting point. A tool built by one team enables an experiment by another. Connect your team of AIs, share a capability someone else needs, and build on what others have learned, produced, built. The ambition is an internet of agents through which scientific knowledge, tools, and capabilities can grow, evolve and be utilized across teams and institutions.
🗓️ When: October 30-November 1, 2026
📍 Where: MIT Media Lab
Bring your expertise, your tools, and a problem worth solving - or find one. Help build AI that can contribute to science through what it can discover, create, and make work.