Key facts
- Proception, founded by former Tesla engineer Jay Li, has settled a trade secret lawsuit with Tesla.
- The company announced an $11 million seed funding round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and BoxGroup.
- Proception is developing high-dexterity robotic hands designed to mimic human capabilities.
- The startup is shipping its initial batch of robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies.
- Proception utilizes a sensor-laden glove to capture human hand interaction data for training its robotic hands.
Proception, a robotics startup founded by former Tesla engineer Jay Li, has settled a trade secret lawsuit filed by its former employer. The company announced the settlement and an $11 million seed funding round led by First Round Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator and BoxGroup.
Li, who was a technical lead on Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot program, was accused of taking trade secrets when he left to start Proception. The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month. Li stated that enduring the legal battle was a "resilience test" and that the company is now focused on developing highly dexterous robotic hands.
Proception is also shipping its first batch of these robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies, aiming to become a leading supplier for companies seeking advanced manipulation capabilities. Li believes that while much attention has gone into robotics, the development of truly human-like robotic hands remains a significant challenge, a point echoed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Unlike many companies that rely on teleoperators for robot training, Proception uses a sensor-laden glove to capture human hand interaction data. This data is then used to train its own robotic hands, which feature 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger. Proception believes this approach, combining advanced hardware with scalable data collection, is key to achieving human-level dexterity in robots.