dexterous-manipulation
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Dyna Robotics
Dyna Robotics is a Redwood City, California startup building embodied-AI foundation models that let robots perform dexterous, real-world manipulation tasks around the clock. Founded in 2024 by repeat entrepreneurs Lindon Gao and York Yang (who sold Caper AI for $350M) and former DeepMind researcher Jason Ma, the company's DYNA-1 model runs commercial deployments in laundries, factories, restaurants and gyms. Dyna raised a $23.5M seed and a $120M Series A in 2025, reaching a valuation above $600M with backing from NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Next and CRV.
6thSense
6thSense builds wearable tactile sensing rigs that record how human hands actually touch the world - pressure, grip, contact, force, depth, vision and 3D hand pose - out in real homes rather than labs. It packages that multimodal, model-ready data and sells it to teams training the next generation of dexterous robots, positioning itself as a 'nervous system for physical AI.' The company is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.
Remy AI
Remy AI is a San Francisco robotics startup in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch building dexterous, AI-powered robots for e-commerce third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses. Its core bet is data: the team captures real human dexterity on real job sites using head-mounted cameras paired with wearable tactile sensors, recording synchronized vision, motion, and contact force. That data trains robotics foundation models so a bi-manual mobile robot can pick, pack, kit, and receive across changing inventory without reprogramming, deploy in weeks rather than months, and target roughly half the cost of legacy automation via a robot-as-a-service model.
Dexmate
Dexmate is a Santa Clara robotics startup building Vega, a general-purpose mobile robot with high-payload arms, dexterous hands and a foldable torso that reaches over seven feet. Founded in 2024 by a team out of MIT, UCSD and CMU, the company pairs custom hardware with a data-driven 'flywheel' learning approach - combining simulation and real-world data - to tackle dexterous manipulation for logistics, manufacturing, retail and research. Backed by NVIDIA and LG Technology Ventures, Dexmate has opened preorders for Vega at $89,999.
Proception
Proception is a Palo Alto and Mountain View robotics company building the dexterous robotic hand that humanoids are missing. Its flagship ProHand 1.0 packs 22 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven fingers and skin-like tactile sensors into a hand designed with input from surgeons - close enough to a human hand that robots can learn directly from human demonstration. A companion sensor glove, ProGlove, captures real human manipulation data at scale to train those movements. Founded in 2024 by former Tesla Optimus engineers Jay Li and Jack Xu, the company raised an $11M seed led by First Round Capital and is shipping its first hands to research labs and robotics companies.
ThoughtForge AI
ThoughtForge AI is a Berkeley-based robotics software company building what it calls Universal Robotic Intelligence: an Active Inference control platform that lets existing industrial robots, drones, and crawlers adapt in real time to messy, unpredictable environments. Its lightweight models run on a single CPU at the edge, claim over 99% accuracy on tasks as designed, and reportedly require roughly 90,000x less training data than conventional deep learning. Founded by veterans of Microsoft's Bonsai AI team, ThoughtForge sells to manufacturing, energy, aerospace, and logistics operators who want to upgrade the robots they already own rather than replace them.
Jay Li
Jay Li is the founder and CEO of Proception, a Palo Alto robotics startup building high-dexterity robotic hands for humanoid robots. A former electronics lead on Tesla's Optimus program, he left to bet that the fastest path to capable robots runs through hardware close enough to the human hand that machines can learn directly from people. His ProHand packs 22 degrees of freedom and skin-like tactile sensors; its companion ProGlove captures human manipulation data with no robot in the loop. In June 2026 Proception shipped its first hands, settled a Tesla trade-secret lawsuit, and closed an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital on the same day.
Tao Chen
Tao Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Dexmate, a Santa Clara robotics startup building general-purpose mobile humanoid robots with genuinely dexterous hands. An MIT CSAIL PhD whose research on in-hand object reorientation won the CoRL 2021 Best Paper Award and landed in Science Robotics, Chen left academia to chase a single conviction: that robots will only matter when their hands can do the small, fiddly, human things. Dexmate's first product, Vega, a folding dual-armed robot built in under six months, is his bet that the moment has finally arrived.