Jay Li thinks being sued by Tesla might have strengthened his company, Proception, after the legal dispute ended this month.
Legal troubles end, funding arrives
The former technical lead on Tesla’s Optimus programme was accused last year of stealing trade secrets to launch his new venture. Months of legal fighting followed, but Tesla dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. The company did not comment on the settlement.
Li now turns his attention to the core challenge: building robot hands that work like human ones.
On Monday, Proception confirmed it has raised $11 million in a seed round. First Round Capital led the investment, with Y Combinator and BoxGroup also contributing.
The firm is shipping its first batch of high-dexterity robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies. It is also opening orders to a wider market. Li aims to become the leading supplier for firms that lack the time or resources to develop dextrous manipulation themselves.
The hard problem of robot hands
While money and attention flood the robotics sector, Li argues most of it misses the specific goal of mimicking human hands.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has long identified robot hands as one of the biggest engineering hurdles. He has suggested Optimus robots could work in factories within years.
The wider consensus disagrees. Kevin Lynch, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, told the Wall Street Journal last year that a decade remains before robotic hands are functional and useful enough to perform human tasks.
Li believes Proception can move faster. His approach relies on a different method of data collection.
Many companies currently use teleoperators. A human wears a virtual reality headset to see what a robot sees and manipulate objects in front of it. The robot learns from these commands.
Li notes a major flaw in this system: the teleoperator does not feel the feedback from objects the robot touches. Furthermore, the method is limited by how many robots a company has available at any given moment.
Proception uses a glove packed with sensors instead. Humans wear the glove and a headset to capture human hand interaction data without needing a robot in the loop.
The same glove acts as sensor-packed skin for the hand Proception is developing. The device has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to allow a wide range of dexterous motions.
This method lets Proception and its customers gather finer, task-specific data. It also scales better than current alternatives.
“You need both hardware and data, and those need to come hand-in-hand to get dextrous manipulation to work,” Li said. “A lot of companies solely focus on hardware, or like hardware plus non-scalable data collection. We’re working on this highly dexterous hardware plus highly scalable data. We believe that’s a key combination to solve this problem.”
Investor confidence
Bill Trenchard, a partner at First Round Capital who led the investment, cited this strategy as a key reason for backing Li.
“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. “Dexterous manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole humanoid story going forward, and as many people have said, it’s sort of the last mile of getting these robots to be truly performant.”
Trenchard also praised Li’s composure during the legal battle with his former employer.
“He was very upfront with us when this came out, and I think the team did an amazing job of keeping their heads down,” Trenchard said. “Jay’s a very strong leader.”
Li remains confident. After facing Tesla’s hardcore litigation department, he told TechCrunch he would not be surprised if the company approaches Proception for help as it grows.
“I think it will happen,” he said.
