Robot hand company settles Tesla trade secret suit and announces $11M raise

Jay Li doesn’t recommend getting sued by Tesla if you’re trying to get a startup off the ground. But he does think his company, Proception, may be better off for having gone through the experience.

“I think it’s kind of a resilience test or pressure test,” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “People say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

Li, who was technical leader of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program, was accused last year by his former employer from absconding with trade secrets to start Proception. But after months of trade After legal battles, he eventually reached a settlement with Tesla, which dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)

Now Li is free to tackle what he says is an even tougher problem: making robot hands work like human ones.

To help with that, Proception announced Monday that it has raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator and early stage fund BoxGroup.

Proception also announced Monday that it is shipping the first batch of its “highly dexterous robotic hand” to “researchers and robotics companies” as it opens up to broader orders. The goal, Li said, is to become the top supplier to other companies that don’t want to spend time or resources developing what is known in the industry as “nimble manipulation.”

Although there has been an avalanche of money and attention rushing into the world of robotics, Li believes this has not been enough to make robot hands truly mimic human hands.

One of the loudest voices speaking about this challenge was his old boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said robotic hands are one of the biggest technical problems yet to be solved.

Although Musk insists that Optimus robots could start working in factories within a few years, the consensus is that it will take many years before robot hands become equivalent to human hands. 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 another decade before they are “functional and useful and able to do some of the things that humans do.”

Li thinks Proception can do it much faster, largely because of the way they collect data.

Most companies currently training humanoid robots use teleoperators to train their systems. A human wearing a virtual reality headset can see what a robot sees and manipulate what is in front of that robot, after which the robot can learn from the commands given by the human.

A major disadvantage of this approach, according to Li, is that the teleoperator does not receive feedback from the objects that the robot touches. This approach is also limited to the number of robots a company has available at any given time, Li said.

Proception’s solution is a glove loaded with sensors. With human testers wearing the gloves (and a headset), Proception and its customers can “capture human hand interaction data without the need for a robot in the loop,” according to Proception’s press release.

The same glove also fits the hand that Proception is developing, acting as the sensor-filled ‘skin’. The hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to allow for a “wide range of dexterous movements,” according to Conception.

Li said this approach will also allow Proception and its customers to collect finer, more task-specific data, allowing the robot hands to more closely resemble those of a human. He also thinks it is better suited to scaling up.

“You need both hardware and data, and they have to go hand in hand [dextrous manipulation] work. Many companies focus solely on hardware, or like hardware plus non-scalable data [collection]” he said. “We are working on very useful hardware and very scalable data. We believe this is a key combination to solve this problem.”

First-round partner Bill Trenchard, who led the investment in Proception, said this was a key reason why he backed Li.

“We think they will have the best hand on the market, perhaps the most advanced hand today, and the underlying data and models to support that,” he told TechCrunch. “Dexterous manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole humanoid story going forward, and as a lot of people have said, it’s kind of the final step in getting these robots really performant.”

Trenchard also praised Li’s ability to keep a cool head while being sued by his former employer.

“He was very candid with us when this came out, and I think the team did a great job of keeping their heads down,” Trenchard said. “Jay is a very strong leader.”

Li is also confident. After he bought Tesla’s “hardcore litigation department,” he told TechCrunch that he wouldn’t be surprised if the company comes calling for help as Proception grows.

“I think it will happen,” he said.