dexterous-manipulation
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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.