Mecka AI, a Toronto and New York company that supplies training data for robots, has acquired Thirdspace, an Ottawa social app, BetaKit reported on October 19, 2026. The cash-and-stock deal closed a few weeks before the report. Neither company disclosed the price.
BetaKit described the transaction as effectively an acquihire. Thirdspace co-founders Cedric Osagie and Eshan Betrabet have joined Mecka as heads of mobile capture, leading work on the app Mecka uses to collect data in people's homes. The Thirdspace app remains live, but the two founders are no longer working on it.
It is Mecka's second acquisition of 2026, after Vancouver-based Docula earlier in the year.
What Thirdspace built
Thirdspace launched in 2025. It was built by Osagie and Betrabet, former students at Carleton University in Ottawa. The app is aimed at what its makers call "IRL side quests": users post photos that can only be viewed briefly and invite friends to join them at a location. Carleton's business school described it as a campus-oriented app for in-person connections.
According to BetaKit, Thirdspace passed 20,000 downloads and 60 million views, and its monthly active users roughly tripled. The startup raised C$100,000 (about $73,000) in angel money before the deal.
The idea ran against most social apps, which keep people scrolling at home. Thirdspace tried to get friends to meet in person, and the short life of each photo gave users a reason to go and join rather than just look.
“They're exceptional growth hackers and thinkers”
Why Mecka is buying
Mecka collects first-person video and related data that robotics companies use to train machines for real-world tasks. A key source is its home data-capture app, and the company pays contributors for the footage they record, so its growth depends on getting more people to use that app.
That is what Mecka wanted from Thirdspace. "They're exceptional growth hackers and thinkers," Mark Grinev, who leads special projects at Mecka, told BetaKit. He called the startup's "small but mighty team" the most important piece of the deal and said scaling the mobile app is imperative to Mecka's goals.
Mecka sells its data to frontier robotics labs and large technology companies, according to Dealroom. Neither company said how many people from Thirdspace beyond the two founders joined Mecka.
A well-funded buyer
Mecka has about 80 employees. It recently announced a $60 million Series B (about C$86 million) from Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung and others, which BetaKit said was all equity and all new money for the company. Mecka says it has raised $120 million in total. According to Dealroom, the Series B was announced shortly before the Thirdspace deal closed.
TechCrunch reported in September that Mecka was valued at about $500 million; Grinev declined to confirm the figure. Mecka told BetaKit it had an annual revenue run rate of $100 million as of June and expects to reach $300 million by the end of the year. Those are the company's own figures.
The company says it has collected millions of hours of video and aims for 100 million hours by the end of 2027. It plans to use the new money to grow its teams in Toronto and New York, open in San Francisco, and pay for compute, storage and contributor payouts.
Talent deals in a tight market
Grinev described the market for AI talent as "quite intense." Buying a small startup is one way for a growing company to hire a team that has already shown it can grow an app, without running a long recruiting process.
For Thirdspace's angel backers, the cash-and-stock structure means part of their return is tied to Mecka's own future. The companies did not say how many Thirdspace users there are today or what Mecka plans to do with the app over time.
