Ex-Tesla engineer settles suit, raises $11M to democratize robot hands
robotics startup proception raised $11m to ship sensor-laden hands for humanoids. this hardware-data approach bypasses slow teleoperation to solve manipulation.
proception, a robotics startup founded by former tesla technical lead jay li, raised $11m in seed funding led by first round capital to commercialize high-dexterity robotic hands. the funding follows the dismissal of a lawsuit by tesla accusing li of stealing trade secrets, which was settled earlier this month. unlike competitors relying on expensive teleoperation setups, proception uses sensor-laden gloves to capture hand interaction data at scale, which is then applied to its 22-degree-of-freedom hardware. the company is now shipping these hands to researchers and aims to supply other humanoid robot manufacturers struggling to master dextrous manipulation. li argues that combining advanced hardware with scalable human data is essential to solving the 'last-mile' engineering problem of robotic manipulation.