Robot hand company settles Tesla trade secret lawsuit and announces $11 million raise

Jay Lee doesn’t recommend suing Tesla if you’re trying to launch a startup. But he thinks his company, Proception, may be better off because it has endured this experience.

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

Lee, who was technical lead for Tesla’s Optimus robotics program, was the His former employer charged him last year Escape with trade secrets to start Proception. But after months of… commerce After legal hits, he finally 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 believes is a more difficult problem: making robot hands work like human hands.

To help do 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 will ship the first batch of its “highly dexterous robotic hand” to “researchers and robotics companies,” with it open to broader orders. The goal is to become a premier supplier to other companies that don’t want to spend time or resources developing what’s known in the industry as “dexterous rigging,” Lee said.

While there has been a torrent of money and attention pouring into the world of robotics, Lee believes not enough has been spent on making robotic hands truly mimic human hands.

One of the loudest voices talking about this challenge was actually his old boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said that robotic hands are one of the biggest unsolved engineering problems yet.

While Musk has maintained that Optimus robots could start working in factories within years, the consensus view is that making robotic hands equivalent to humans is still many years away. 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 a decade for them to become “effective and useful and able to do some of the things that humans do.”

Lee believes Proception can do this much faster, largely because of the way they collect data.

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

The big drawback to this approach, according to Lee, is that the remote operator does not receive feedback from the things the robot touches. This approach is also limited by the number of robots a company has available at any given moment, Lee said.

Proception’s solution is a sensor-laden glove. With human testers wearing 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 is also placed on the hand where Proception evolves, acting as a “skin” filled with sensors. The hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to enable a “wide range of dexterous movements,” according to Proception.

This approach will also allow Proception and its customers to collect more accurate and task-specific data that could allow its robotic hands to more accurately resemble human hands, Lee said. He also believes it is better to expand.

“You need both hardware and data, and those have to come hand-in-hand for (manual processing) to work,” he said. “A lot of companies focus only on hardware, or similar hardware plus data (the combination) is not scalable.” “We are working on this highly efficient device combined with highly scalable data. We believe this is a key combination to solve this problem.”

Series A partner Bill Trenchard, who led the investment in Proception, said this was a big reason why he backed Li.

“We think they will have the best hand in the market, probably the most sophisticated hand today, and the underlying data and models to back that up,” he told TechCrunch. “Dexterous manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole robot story going forward, and as a lot of people have said, it’s kind of the last mile to making these robots really effective.”

Trenchard also praised Lee’s ability to remain calm while being sued by his former employer.

“He was very honest 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.”

Lee is also confident. “After confronting Tesla”Hardcore Litigation DepartmentHe told TechCrunch that he wouldn’t be surprised if the company came asking for help as Proception grows.

“I think it will happen,” he said.