Mechanism Capital

2025 was an insane year for robotics research Long time model architecture/training challenges were solved and major progress was made on data collection techniques, understanding data quality, and data recipe. This gives Physical AI companies the confidence to finally start investing in large scale data collection. You saw companies like Figure, Dyna, and PI reach >99% success rates in real life deployments in diverse settings by leveraging RL innovations. Many frameworks were developed for self improving and self-recovering robot models. Researchers figured out how to prevent overfitting in VLA fine-tuning while retaining generalist capabilities. Which means we can build toward generalist models by merging specialist models. Robots can also move much more agilely from methods like action chunking and FAST tokenization. We see robots able to exhibit smooth full body control at human speeds and not slow or choppy movement. Roboticists showed how to effectively fuse multi-modal sensor data for huge policy improvements. Integrating vision, language and tactile data was challenging, but doing so opens the door for many contact rich tasks that require a granular sense of force. Force awareness also solves for common issues like visual occlusions. System 1/2 architectures were hardened to handle long-horizon planning/ task orchestration which enable robots to perform jobs that require series of tasks. Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 introduced Chain-of-Thought reasoning to physical agents, allowing them to parse constraints and evaluate Semantic Safety. Memory advancements allowed robots to maintain long-term spatio-temporal reasoning, breaking the "memory wall" with brain-inspired algorithms. NVIDIA's ReMEmber used memory-based navigation, while Titans + MIRAS enabled test-time memorization for sustained performance. Advancements in the foundation model space also continue to compound progress in Robotics. Better VLMs means VLAs with better spatial understanding and data labeling and processing pipelines that can massively increase in throughput. World models are starting to show promise in data augmentation and policy evaluations. 2025 gave us a small taste of what data scale could do. A glimpse into the future with robots exhibiting emergent intelligence such as zero-shot affordance mapping, visual force sensitivity, and all sorts of general physical reasoning 2026 we get to experience physical AI with 100x the data scale

We’re excited to colead Dyna’s Series A with a $68M investment Dyna is one of the ONLY companies that have performant physical intelligence models that are ready to be deployed in the real world Physical AGI is coming! Make sure to follow @Lindon_Gao @JasonMa2020 @YorkYang5050

Earlier this year, we led an investment consortium that invested $120M into @Apptronik This is our thesis on Humanoids and Apptronik mechanism.capital/writings/our-i…

We took a look at the hourly cost equivalence of a humanoid at different price points vs human labor A humanoid at $50,000 is more economical than even a worker in India at $2/hour Human labor will be mostly unnecessary in the next decade

The Bitcoin financial ecosystem will eat the world. Solana is a prime environment for its next phase of expansion. In our research, we explore how @ZeusNetworkHQ will be one of the key projects driving that forward mechanism.capital/writings/the-b…

Rewriting Crypto Trading Capital Structures - @breakoutprop Access to capital is a huge barrier for retail crypto traders. This forces them to choose between trenches or irresponsibly high leverage. There’s a better way. Crypto trading is evolving from a monolithic, collateral-heavy world to a modular, capital-efficient future. Just as DeFi unbundled exchanges into primitives—AMMs, oracles, lending markets—we’re now seeing the capital stack itself rearchitected. The old way? On traditional venues you front the capital and take all the risk. Leverage amplifies both gains and catastrophic losses. It's a system designed to bleed most traders dry. @Breakoutprop has a different model. They’re pioneering this shift by rewriting the trading capital structure stack by allowing users to trade with capital—not against it. Instead of your capital at risk, it's theirs. Traders bring the skill, they bring the capital. Both share the trading profits. Pass the evaluation, and traders get access to house money and no liquidation anxiety. It’s a structure that flips the script: risk is externalized, alpha is rewarded. The structure prioritizes upside for performance. Better traders can fast track their portfolio growth without resorting to high leverage. What Breakout is building isn’t just a funding model; it’s a new financial primitive that slots cleanly into the emerging modular trading stack. Think: execution layer, perp infra, and now → capital-as-a-service. Breakout accounts scale up to $100K in size (with max combined capital of $200K), and traders can access 5x leverage on BTC/ETH and 2x on altcoins. In practice, that means <$1K in evaluation fees can unlock up to $500K in buying power—without debt or collateral. Both traders and Breakout win, when traders win, but traders keep 80–90% of profits, benefiting from instant, unconditional withdrawals. The model rewards precision over risk, and talent over bankroll. In a world moving toward unbundled infrastructure and composable finance, Breakoutprop is a bet on crypto-native trading capital structures. We believe this is how trading should look: permissionless access to capital, aligned incentives, and modular design. Traders can use code 'APE' for a discount at checkout @MechanismCap invested in Breakout in 2024 and since then they've attracted over 30,000 unique users with May volume exceeding $4B

This past year has been one of the most interesting of @MechanismCap's history We continued to back some stellar crypto teams across synthetic dollars (@ethena), memecoins (@pumpdotfun), distributed AI systems (@NousResearch + @PrimeIntellect) and consumer (@defiapp) But we also expanded heavily into Deeptech backing companies in Robotics (@Figure_robot + @Apptronik), Brain Emulation, and Nuclear The pace of change in the world is the highest it's ever been and its a great time to be part of it

New Investments New Website Still investing on the frontier mechanism.capital

We’re excited to announce our $7.5M Seed round to bring real-time, app-specific extensions to Solana L2s are yesterday’s solution. This raise accelerates our vision to become the real-time Engine for decentralized games & applications, built natively on Solana without fragmentation.

Stoked to have invested in Apptronik's Series A My second humanoid investment and one of my largest investments ever Commercializing humanoids at scale is one of the worlds most difficult technical challenges, and takes an incredibly experienced and multidisciplinary team to get it right Over the past 9 years the team has accumulated deep hardware/control systems experience and their partnership with Google brings them S tier AI experience to be able to soon deliver fully autonomous, durable robots to do real world work These robots are going to cook (literally)

New Guardian Initiating: Mechanism Capital Joins A visionary, @MechanismCap recognizes Solana’s potential to unlock Bitcoin liquidity and steps in as the newest Guardian, reinforcing security and accelerating network expansion. A growing network means greater liquidity, deeper decentralization, and more dynamic interaction through $ZEUS delegation. Capacity unlocks this week. Step in.

DeFi with Robinhood UX is here One App, No Bridging or Gas, Instant Trades app.defi.app/join/EvcSLH

Our team is proud to announce our $4M seed round led by @MechanismCap with participation from @OakGroveVC , @SeliniCapital , @rubikvc , @ProtagonistXYZ , @sophon , @TON_Ventures , @ManifoldTrading , @BitscaleCapital , and other incredible founders, builders, and industry leaders. @TheMiraiLabs is the team behind the @partnrxyz ecosystem and this funding helps us accelerate the development of consumer crypto products designed for both human and agentic users.

Today we're launching a $25M RWAfi Ecosystem Fund to support teams building the future of tokenized assets. We're proud to have @galaxyhq, @Superscrypt, @recvcx, @mechanismcap, @HashKeyGroup, @SeliniCapital, & @manifoldtrading back this initiative. Find out how to get funded 👇

Imagine a mobile app that could protect millions in emerging markets from unstable currencies Meet @zarpay_app — converting cash to stablecoins on Solana through local money agents, starting in Pakistan

twas the night before Jan 3 and all through the house.. join us Thursday Jan 2, the day before the $BIO TGE community call covering: TGE, dev updates, DeSci '25 who: BIO team & investors @ZeePrimeCap @MechanismCap wind down from nye in the biosphere: x.com/i/spaces/1RDGl…

1/ Ethereum has a fragmentation issue. Liquidity spread across dozens of chains/rollups not composable with each other Justin Drake proposed an advanced scaling solution in 2023 called Based Roll Ups @puffer_unifi @puffer_finance are the first to execute on this vision

A Solution To Ethereum's Fragmentation Dilemma - @puffer_finance mechanism.capital/based-rollups-…