Proception, a San Francisco startup building high-dexterity humanoid robot hands, has raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital, the company announced on June 29, 2026 - the same day it settled a high-profile trade secret lawsuit brought by Tesla.
From Optimus to a clean-sheet start
Founder Jay Li was a technical lead on Tesla's Optimus humanoid program before leaving to start Proception. Tesla sued him in 2025, alleging he took robotics trade secrets. After months of legal sparring, the two sides reached a confidential settlement and Tesla dismissed the case earlier in June, clearing the way for Proception's funding announcement. Y Combinator and early-stage fund BoxGroup also joined the round.
"I think it's kind of like a resilience test," Li told TechCrunch of the litigation. With the suit behind him, he is now free to chase what many in the field consider robotics' hardest problem: making robot hands work like a human's.
A glove that captures human dexterity
Proception's bet is on data. Rather than relying solely on teleoperators wearing VR headsets - an approach Li says lacks tactile feedback and is bottlenecked by how many robots a company owns - Proception uses a sensor-laden glove. Human testers wearing the glove and a headset capture rich "human hand interaction data without requiring a robot in the loop." That same glove doubles as the tactile "skin" on the company's robotic hand.
Shipping the first hands
Alongside the raise, Proception began shipping the first batch of its high-dexterity hand to researchers and robotics companies while opening wider orders. The hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to enable a broad range of dexterous motions. Li wants Proception to become the leading hand supplier for firms that lack the time or resources to build dexterous manipulation in-house.
First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led the deal, called dexterous manipulation "the last mile" of the humanoid story and said Proception could have "the best hand in the market." The funding lands amid a broader surge in robotics investment, echoing other recent dexterity bets such as LinkerBot's planned Hong Kong IPO and foundation-model efforts like Genesis AI's general-purpose robot. It also adds to a wave of well-funded embodied-AI players including X Square Robot.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch and Proception.