Proception settles Tesla lawsuit, raises $11M for robot hands

Jay Li, who left Tesla after leading technical work on its Optimus humanoid robot, founded Proception and was later sued by Tesla for allegedly taking trade secrets. The lawsuit has now been settled and dismissed. Proception announced Monday it has raised $11M in seed funding from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and BoxGroup. With the legal cloud lifted, Li is free to pursue what he calls an even harder problem: making robot hands work like a human’s. The company is now shipping its first batch of highly dexterous robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies, with wider orders open.

Proception’s key innovation is a sensor-laden glove that captures human hand interaction data without requiring a physical robot in the loop. This same glove serves as the hand’s “skin,” enabling the robotic hand—which has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger—to learn dexterous tasks. Li believes this approach solves the scaling problem of traditional teleoperation, which limits data collection to the number of available robots and lacks tactile feedback. First Round partner Bill Trenchard says the combination of sophisticated hardware and scalable data gives Proception the best hand in the market, addressing the critical “last mile” of humanoid robot performance.