Proception, a robotics startup founded by a former Tesla Optimus engineer, has settled a trade secret lawsuit filed by Tesla and announced an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator and BoxGroup. The company is now shipping its first high-dexterity robotic hand to researchers and robotics companies. Proception's approach combines a sensor-laden glove that captures human hand interaction data without requiring a robot in the loop, paired with hardware featuring 22 degrees of freedom. Founder Jay Li argues that combining highly dexterous hardware with scalable data collection is the key to solving dexterous manipulation, a problem widely considered one of the hardest remaining challenges in humanoid robotics.
