Jay Li, the former technical lead on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program who was accused last year of taking trade secrets from his employer, has settled the dispute with Tesla. After months of legal exchanges, Tesla dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)
Li told TechCrunch the litigation felt like a resilience or pressure test for the startup; now he is focused on what he considers an even tougher challenge: making robot hands function like human hands.
$11 million seed round and first shipments
Proception announced on Monday that it raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and early-stage fund BoxGroup. The company also said it is shipping the first batch of its “high-dexterity robotic hand” to researchers and robotics companies and is opening up for wider orders.
Proception’s stated aim is to become the primary hand supplier for companies that do not want to invest the time or resources to develop what the industry calls dextrous manipulation themselves.
The challenge and Proception’s approach
Li argues that, despite the flood of money into robotics, not enough attention has gone into making robot hands truly mimic human hands. One prominent voice on the topic has been Li’s former boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has called robot hands one of the biggest engineering problems left to solve.
While Musk has suggested Optimus robots might start working in factories within years, the broader view is that human-equivalent robot hands are still many years away. Kevin Lynch, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, told the Wall Street Journal last year that his team believes it will take about a decade for hands to be “functional and useful and able to do some of the things that humans do.”
Proception believes it can move faster largely because of how it collects data. Most companies training humanoid robots now use teleoperators: a human wearing a VR headset sees through the robot’s perspective and manipulates objects, then the robot learns from those commands. Li says a major drawback of that method is the teleoperator doesn’t receive tactile feedback from the objects the robot touches, and the approach is limited by the number of available robots.
Proception’s alternative is a sensor-laden glove. Human testers wearing the gloves (and a headset) allow Proception and its customers to capture human hand–object interaction data without requiring a robot in the loop, the company said. The same glove is used as the sensor-packed “skin” on the hand Proception is developing. According to the company, the hand offers 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to enable a wide range of dexterous motions.
Li says this method enables finer, task-specific data collection that can help robotic hands more closely resemble human performance, and that it is better suited to scale.
"You need both hardware and data, and those need to come hand-in-hand to get [dextrous manipulation] to work. A lot of companies solely focus on hardware, or like hardware plus non-scalable data [collection]," Li said. "We’re working on this highly dexterous hardware plus highly scalable data. We believe that’s a key combination to solve this problem."
Investors’ take and next steps
First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led the investment in Proception, said that combination of advanced hardware and scalable data was a major reason for backing the company. "We think they will have the best hand in the market, maybe the most sophisticated hand today, and the underlying data and models to support that," Trenchard told TechCrunch. He added that dextrous manipulation is a critical piece of the humanoid robotics story and could be the ‘‘last mile’’ toward truly performant robots.
Trenchard also praised Li and the team for keeping composure during the Tesla lawsuit. Li said he himself would not be surprised if Tesla reached out for help as Proception grows, noting that he expected such a collaboration could happen.
"I think it will happen," he said.
