Proception Raises $11 Million and Ships 22-DOF Robotic Hands After Tesla Suit Ends
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 29
Proception Raises $11 Million and Ships 22-DOF Robotic Hands After Tesla Suit Ends
1 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 29
Summary
$11 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital gives Proception fresh backing as it starts shipping its first high-dexterity robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies.
Earlier this month, Tesla dropped its trade-secret lawsuit against founder Jay Li, a former Optimus technical lead, clearing the startup to widen orders and focus on commercial rollout.
Proception says its edge is a sensor-loaded glove that captures human hand interaction data without a robot in the loop, then doubles as the robotic hand's tactile skin.
The hand has 22 degrees of freedom, and Li argues pairing that hardware with scalable data collection can solve dexterous manipulation faster than teleoperation-heavy approaches now common in humanoid robotics.
The bet targets a bottleneck even Elon Musk has highlighted: making robot hands truly useful, a challenge many researchers still think could take about a decade.