London-based robotics startup Machenta has raised $40 million in a seed funding round, which it says is the largest seed round ever raised by a UK robotics company. The round was co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. The company has also emerged from stealth to introduce its technology publicly.

Machenta was founded by Edward Johns, a robotics professor at Imperial College London, and his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius.

The startup is developing an AI model that helps robots learn physical tasks quickly. Its technology aims to reduce the time and cost of training robots by removing the need for large numbers of demonstrations.

Johns describes the approach as “physical vibe coding,” where robots can learn new tasks almost immediately. Machenta has trained its AI model using computer-generated simulations rather than real-world data.

According to the company, robots using its model can learn to perform tasks such as packaging, assembling products and tidying up after watching a task being demonstrated just once.

Johns said: “Intelligence is not so much about what you can already do; it’s about how quickly you can learn to do something new. Humans don’t need to see the same thing over and over before they can do it. If you take some objects, and show somebody what to do with them, they’ll probably then be able to do the same task immediately. We’ve spent years trying to understand what it would take for robots to learn at the speed of a human. That is what instant robot learning is about.”

The funding will help Machenta improve its technology and grow its team of around 12 employees at its office in King’s Cross, London.