TechCrunch reports that Mecka AI is closing a Sequoia-led round at a valuation of around $500 million, just three months after a $60 million raise led by Framework Ventures. The two-year-old startup does something deliberately unglamorous: it pays ordinary people to record themselves doing everyday tasks, like making coffee or fixing cars, wearing body sensors and carrying smartphones. That footage becomes training data for humanoid robots. None of the four co-founders came from robotics. They simply concluded that the shortage of physical-world data, not algorithms, was what was holding general-purpose robots back. TechCrunch notes the terms are not final and Sequoia declined to comment.