en.Wedoany.com Reported - Proception, a robotics startup founded by former Tesla Optimus engineer Jay Li, announced the completion of an $11 million seed round after reaching a settlement with Tesla and ending a year-long trade secret lawsuit. The round was led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and BoxGroup. The funds will be used to develop highly dexterous robot hands. Proception revealed that its first batch of highly dexterous hands has begun shipping to research institutions and robotics companies, and is now open for broader orders.
In June 2025, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Jay Li and Proception in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Li downloaded confidential documents related to robot hand actuation to his personal devices before founding the company within six days of resigning. The lawsuit claimed that Proception's robot hand bore "striking similarities" to Tesla's internal designs. After months of legal proceedings, the two parties reached a settlement, and Tesla recently dropped the lawsuit. Jay Li told TechCrunch that he views the experience as a "resilience test, or a stress test," and believes the company has matured as a result. He also stated that he would not be surprised if Tesla eventually turns to Proception for help with hand-related issues. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Dexterous manipulation—the ability for robots to grasp, rotate, and manipulate objects with human-like precision—remains one of the most challenging problems in robotics. Elon Musk has bluntly stated that the robot hand is the biggest unsolved engineering challenge. Kevin Lynch, director of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University, told The Wall Street Journal last year that his team estimates robot hands still need at least a decade to achieve sufficient functionality and practicality to perform tasks that humans can handle.
Jay Li believes Proception can achieve breakthroughs faster, with the key lying in how it collects training data. Most humanoid robot companies currently use a teleoperator model—where an operator wears a VR headset to remotely control the robot, and the system learns from it. Jay Li points out that the main flaw of this model is that operators lack tactile feedback when the robot contacts objects, and it is limited by the number of available robots. Proception's alternative is a glove equipped with numerous sensors that can directly capture human hand interaction data without requiring a robot. The same glove will also serve as the "skin" for the robot hand Proception is developing, which features 22 degrees of freedom with multiple joints per finger. Jay Li believes the combination of scalable data collection and highly dexterous hardware fills a gap in the market.
The dexterous hand market has attracted significant capital this year. Linkerbot, a Chinese company commanding up to 80% of the global high-degree-of-freedom hand market, ships over 1,000 units per month and has a valuation target of $6 billion. European startup Genesis AI raised $105 million for its wheeled dexterous hand robot, while Chinese competitor Xynova and others have also completed nearly 1 billion yuan in funding. Proception is betting that most humanoid robot companies will choose to purchase hands externally rather than manufacture them in-house, similar to how the automotive industry handles specialized components. First Round Capital partner Bill Trenchard told TechCrunch that dexterous manipulation is "the last mile to make these robots truly high-performance," and praised Jay Li's leadership under the pressure of the lawsuit.
Tesla has discussed producing Optimus at its Shanghai Gigafactory and has deployed over 1,000 Gen 3 units in its own facilities, but the robot's hand remains the weakest link. Musk has set a target price of $20,000 to $30,000 per Optimus unit, with plans to achieve tens of thousands of units in production by 2028. Whether Tesla will ultimately manufacture hands in-house or source them from companies like Proception has become one of the unresolved questions in the humanoid robot supply chain. With over 150 companies competing in the humanoid robot market and billion-dollar valuations becoming common, only 23% of enterprise buyers are satisfied with existing products. In this context, a startup selling the most challenging component, even at the seed stage, has a clear market position. Whether Proception can expand from its initial shipments to a position where it influences how the entire robot category uses its hands is the core bet First Round Capital is making this time.
