Li previously worked as a technical lead on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program. Tesla sued him last year, accusing him of taking trade secrets to launch Proception. The two sides later reached a settlement, and Tesla dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. Tesla did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
“I think it’s kind of like a resilience test, or pressure test,” Li told TechCrunch. “People say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
Proception is focused on one of the harder unsolved pieces of humanoid robotics: building robot hands that can perform more like human hands. Li argues that much of the recent investment and attention in robotics has not been matched by enough progress on the manipulation layer that lets robots handle objects with human-like control.
The company’s approach combines a sensor-loaded glove with a robotic hand that uses the same glove as its sensor layer. Human testers wear the gloves, along with a headset, so Proception and its customers can collect hand interaction data without needing a robot involved in each training session.
Li said that differs from the common teleoperation setup, where a person uses a virtual reality headset to control what a robot does. In his view, that method is constrained because operators do not receive physical feedback from the objects the robot touches and because data collection depends on how many robots are available.
Proception says its hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints in each finger, allowing it to perform a broad range of dexterous motions. Li said pairing the hardware with scalable data collection is central to the company’s strategy.
“You need both hardware and data, and those need to come hand-in-hand to get to work. A lot of companies solely focus on hardware, or like hardware plus non-scalable data ,” he said. “We’re working on this highly dexterous hardware plus highly scalable data. We believe that’s a key combination to solve this problem.”
First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led the investment, said Proception’s combination of hardware, data and models was a major reason for backing the startup.
“We think they will have the best hand in the market, maybe the most sophisticated hand today, and the underlying data and models to support that,” Trenchard told TechCrunch. “Dexterous manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole humanoid story going forward, and as many people have said, it’s sort of the last mile of getting these robots to be truly performant.”
Trenchard also said Li handled the Tesla lawsuit directly with investors while continuing to build the company. “He was very upfront with us when this came out, and I think the team did an amazing job of keeping their heads down,” Trenchard said. “Jay’s a very strong leader.”
Li said the experience has not lowered his ambitions. After dealing with Tesla’s “hardcore litigation department,” he told TechCrunch he believes Tesla could eventually become a Proception customer. “I think it will happen,” he said.
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Proception.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
