A 23-year-old Nigerian entrepreneur, Cedric Osagie-Ogunbor, has secured a major breakthrough in the global technology industry after Mecka AI, a fast-growing artificial intelligence startup, acquired Thirdspace, the social app he co-founded with fellow entrepreneur Eshan Betrabet.
The acquisition brings Osagie and Betrabet into Mecka AI, where they will lead mobile capture initiatives and help expand the company’s efforts to gather real-world data for training robots.
The Toronto- and New York-based startup announced the deal on Monday, October 19, 2026, shortly after raising $60 million in Series B funding from prominent investors, including Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Samsung.
Although the financial terms were not disclosed, the transaction was structured as a combination of cash and stock. It represents Mecka’s second acquisition and is primarily aimed at bringing the founders’ expertise and growth strategies into the company.
From a university idea to a global AI opportunity
Osagie and Betrabet, former students of Carleton University in Canada, launched Thirdspace in 2025 to help university students overcome loneliness and build stronger social connections through spontaneous, real-life experiences.
The app encourages users to share photographs of activities they are enjoying and invite friends to join them. Once an invitation is accepted, participants receive a location where they can meet and capture a photograph together.
Described as a blend of BeReal, Instagram and Snapchat, Thirdspace built its identity around turning online interactions into opportunities for face-to-face encounters.
Despite receiving just $100,000 in Canadian angel investment, the startup recorded more than 20,000 downloads and 60 million views in less than two years. Its monthly active users were also growing at a rate of threefold, demonstrating the founders’ ability to attract and retain users with relatively limited funding.
That growth caught Mecka AI’s attention.
Mark Grinev, Mecka’s special projects lead, said the company was particularly impressed by the founders’ ability to create viral content formats and develop strategies that encouraged organic growth.
He described the Thirdspace team as small but highly effective, explaining that its experience in scaling a consumer-facing application could help Mecka reach millions of potential contributors.
A new mission: helping robots learn from humans
Following the acquisition, Osagie and Betrabet have stopped working on Thirdspace and joined Mecka AI as heads of mobile capture. They will oversee the expansion of its home data-capture application and lead its broader mobile initiatives.
Thirdspace will continue operating, although its founders will no longer be directly involved in its day-to-day activities.
Mecka AI is developing technology that enables robots to learn from how humans perform everyday tasks. Its approach centres on collecting first-person, or egocentric, video footage that captures activities from the perspective of the person performing them.
Unlike much of the text and visual material used to train conventional AI systems, this type of real-world behavioural data cannot simply be scraped from the internet at the scale required.
Mecka has developed specialised recording hardware, sensors, computer-vision technology and multimodal models to transform footage into useful training data for advanced robotics companies and technology firms.
The company has already collected millions of hours of first-person video from hundreds of thousands of people. However, it believes substantially more data will be necessary to train robots to operate effectively in real-world environments.
Its target is to collect 100 million hours of footage by the end of 2027.
Achieving that ambition will require millions of people to download its application, mount their smartphones on their heads and record themselves carrying out different tasks.
Osagie’s experience in building a social application with viral appeal is expected to play a crucial role in attracting and engaging this vast network of contributors.
He noted that Mecka was among the first robotics-focused companies he had encountered that approached application growth like a traditional consumer technology business, an approach he believes offers significant advantages.
Mecka’s growing ambitions
The acquisition comes as Mecka AI accelerates its expansion following its latest funding round.
The approximately 80-person company has now raised $120 million in total funding. Its Series B round brought in $60 million in fresh capital, with the money earmarked for expanding its teams in Toronto and New York, establishing a presence in San Francisco, developing its technology and covering the substantial computing, storage and data-contributor costs associated with its operations.
Mecka also reported that it had exceeded a $100 million annualised revenue run rate in June and expected to reach $300 million by the end of 2026.
Although reports have placed the company’s valuation at approximately $500 million, Mecka declined to disclose its valuation following the latest funding round.
Grinev said the company raised substantial capital within a short period because of the scale of the opportunity it sees in robotics and the resources required to maintain its rapid growth.
He also acknowledged that competition for artificial intelligence talent has intensified, adding that further acquisitions aimed at bringing talented teams into the company could happen in the future.
For Osagie, the transition from building a social app designed to bring friends together in the physical world to helping robots understand and navigate that same world marks a significant new chapter in his technology career.
The deal also highlights how ideas developed by young entrepreneurs can find opportunities far beyond their original markets when their products demonstrate the ability to attract users, solve problems and scale.