Proception has raised $11 million in seed funding and started shipping its first ProHand robotic hands to researchers and robotics companies. The funding follows the startup’s settlement of a trade secrets lawsuit filed by Tesla against founder Jay Li.
First Round Capital led the round, with participation from Y Combinator and BoxGroup. Proception said in its official announcement that the funding will support team expansion, production and the development of hardware and data systems for dexterous manipulation.
Li previously served as a technical lead on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program. Tesla sued Li and Proception in 2025, alleging that he took confidential information related to robotic hand technology before starting the company.
After months of legal proceedings, Tesla dismissed the lawsuit in June 2026 following a settlement. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.
Li described the dispute as a resilience or pressure test for the startup. First Round partner Bill Trenchard said Li had been open with investors about the lawsuit and remained focused while the case continued.
ProHand Targets Human-Like Dexterity
Proception wants to supply robotic hands to companies that do not want to develop their own dexterous manipulation hardware. The term describes a robot’s ability to use its fingers and hands to handle objects with precision.
ProHand has 22 degrees of freedom, several joints in each finger and skin-like sensors that detect contact. Its tendon-driven design allows the fingers to perform a range of human-like movements while keeping the hand compact.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has described robotic hands as one of the hardest engineering problems facing humanoid robots. Kevin Lynch, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, previously estimated that it could take a decade before such hands become useful enough to perform some human tasks.
Sensor Glove Supports Data Collection
Many robotics companies train humanoid systems through teleoperation. A person wearing a virtual-reality headset controls a robot, and the system learns from the operator’s commands.
Li said this method is limited by the number of available robots and does not provide operators with direct physical feedback from the objects being handled. Proception instead developed ProGlove, a wearable glove fitted with the same sensor technology used on ProHand.
Human testers can wear the glove while interacting with real objects, allowing Proception and its customers to collect hand-movement and contact data without using a robot during every session. Li said the combination of dexterous hardware and scalable data collection could help the company develop human-like robotic manipulation faster.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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