Macrodata Labs was founded by Guilherme Penedo and Hynek Kydlíček . Both previously worked on FineWeb at Hugging Face and are listed as authors of the FineWeb dataset paper
. Their background is in large-scale data curation and refinement for language-model training, which they are now applying to physical-world data for robots
.
"Over the last few years at Hugging Face, Hynek and I worked on some of the most widely used open LLM pre-training datasets, including FineWeb and FinePDFs. That work gave us a front-row seat to how scaling compute and data drove progress in LLMs. We are starting to see a similar takeoff in robotics," Penedo wrote in a LinkedIn announcement .
Refiner is Macrodata Labs' first product — an open-source robotics data processing framework . It is described as a toolkit for turning messy robot videos and other physical-world data into cleaner robotics training data
.
The framework reads the formats robotics teams actually use — LeRobot, HDF5 (ALOHA, robomimic, LIBERO), Zarr, MCAP, raw video, and Hugging Face datasets — and provides tooling for processing demonstrations, frames, trajectories, annotations, and sensor streams .
Refiner is designed to work locally for development and scale to an elastic serverless cloud with a single command . The company positions it as a "data refinery" for physical AI
.
Macrodata Labs raised a $4 million pre-seed round led by Air Street Capital, a London-based firm focused on AI-first companies and founded by Nathan Benaich . The round included participation from Drysdale Ventures, OPRTRS CLUB, Kima Ventures, YG Ventures (Alex Yazdi), >commit, Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face co-founder), and business angels from leading AI labs and technology companies
.
Air Street Capital, which closed a $232 million Fund III earlier in 2026, has a portfolio that includes Synthesia, Black Forest Labs, Wayve, Poolside, and other AI-first companies .
Macrodata Labs' public messaging remains focused on building the data layer for robotics rather than on an explicit Europe-specific robotics strategy . The strongest supported claim is that the company is backed by Air Street Capital, a London-based AI-focused venture firm
. This investor context suggests European capital is actively backing robotics data infrastructure, but the company itself has not issued a formal statement on Europe's role in robotics
.