Palo Alto · Robotics · Est. 2024
Proception gives robots the one thing they still lack.
Everyone is building humanoids. Almost nobody is building the hands. Proception is the company that decided to.
Everyone is building humanoids. Almost nobody is building the hands. Proception is the company that decided to.
Watch the demo reels and the humanoid revolution looks finished. Machines stride across warehouse floors, track objects with steady cameras, catch themselves mid-stumble. Then someone hands one a needle and a thread, and the illusion ends. The hardest thing in robotics is not the walking. It is the grasping - the thousand tiny corrections your fingers make without you ever noticing.
Proception looked at that gap and did something unfashionable. Instead of building another full robot, it built the missing part. ProHand is a dexterous robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven fingers, and a skin of sensors that registers contact the way yours does. The bet is simple: build a hand close enough to a human's, and robots can learn manipulation from human demonstration directly - no guessing required.
Twenty-two degrees of freedom. Multi-jointed, tendon-driven fingers kept light and compact. Skin-like sensors that detect contact. An impact-tolerant build designed with input from hand surgeons - people who spend careers on exactly how a hand survives, adapts and feels. Shipping now to research labs and robotics companies.
A sensor-packed glove a human wears while doing ordinary work - gripping, twisting, correcting, touching. It captures real manipulation data at scale with no robot in the loop. That data trains the models. The same sensing tech doubles as the hand's skin. Watch the human, teach the machine.
Bars are illustrative of Proception's design emphasis, not published benchmarks.
Stanford, then two years at Tesla working on the advanced robotic-hand sensors at the heart of the Optimus program. Left in 2024 to give every robot the hand he'd been perfecting for one.
University of Waterloo. Built robotic systems at Tesla and, before that, at Trexo - a YC 2019 robotics startup. The engineering half of a two-person bet on dexterity.
Proception posts demos and product footage across its channels. Start with the YouTube channel and the YC launch page, then follow along.
Come back to that reel where the humanoid froze at the needle. Now picture the hand doing the freezing swapped for one with twenty-two joints and skin that feels the thread. That is the whole company in a single frame - not a smarter robot, a better hand. Proception is betting the humanoid era won't arrive on legs. It'll arrive at the fingertips, and it'll arrive shipping.