He has spent three decades in the physical layer of technology - chips, displays, sensors. Now he wants to give robots something they have never had: a sense of touch.
Most of the artificial intelligence you hear about lives on a screen. Vikram Pavate has spent his working life on the harder part - the moment the machine has to reach out and handle something real.
Pavate is the CEO and co-founder of Tacta Systems, a Palo Alto robotics company that came out of stealth in June 2025 with $75 million and an unusual pitch. While much of the industry races to build better robot brains, Tacta is building what it calls the nervous system - a fusion of AI, software and tactile hardware meant to give machines human-like touch, spatial awareness and the ability to manipulate delicate, variable objects. The company's name for it is Dextrous Intelligence.
To understand why an entrepreneur would spend a career arriving at that problem, it helps to trace the line backwards. Pavate trained first as a ceramic engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) in Varanasi, then took a master's in materials science and engineering at Purdue, and later an MBA in entrepreneurial management from The Wharton School. It is an unusual combination - deep materials engineering paired with the language of business - and it maps almost exactly onto the kind of company he now runs, where the physics of a sensor matters as much as the market for it.
His early career ran through Applied Materials, the semiconductor-equipment giant, where he held product management, marketing and management roles. From there he moved into younger, riskier ventures at the edge of what hardware could do: Kovio, a printed-electronics startup, where he was vice president of business development and marketing; and then LuxVue Technology, a pioneer in micro-LED displays. LuxVue was quietly acquired by Apple in 2014, one of the tech giant's stealthier hardware bets, and Pavate's role there put him at the center of a technology that took years of patient engineering before the world noticed it.
That pattern - long, quiet work on a physical technology before it becomes obvious - repeats. In 2014 he co-founded Locix, a sensing and location-intelligence company, and ran it as CEO for roughly eight years. Sensing, precision, the physical world: by the time Tacta came together, Pavate had spent a professional lifetime on exactly the ingredients robotic dexterity requires.
“Enabling machines to solve complex, physical world problems is the next frontier in robotics technology.”
Robots today can see and they can plan. What they struggle with is the unglamorous skill a toddler masters early: picking up something fragile, adjusting grip when it slips, working with objects that vary from one to the next. This is the bottleneck Tacta set out to break. The company describes Dextrous Intelligence as a smart nervous system that lets a robot sense, adapt and manipulate the physical world with human-like precision and speed - the combination of tactile sensing, hardware and AI needed to make machines useful for delicate, repetitive, human-like tasks in factories and industrial settings.
The funding reflects how seriously investors take the idea. Tacta's $75 million came in two parts: a previously undisclosed $11 million seed led by Matter Venture Partners, and a $64 million Series A led by America's Frontier Fund and SBVA. The round drew a long list of strategic and industrial backers - B Capital, EDBI, Sojitz Corporation, CDIB-TEN Capital, Yazaki Innovations, B5 Capital, Tyche Partners and Toyota-linked Woven Capital among them - the kind of roster that suggests interest from the manufacturers who would actually deploy such robots.
Pavate co-founded the company with Andreas Bibl, a serial hard-tech entrepreneur who serves as executive chairman. One investor described Tacta as led by one of the most seasoned hard-tech entrepreneurs he had ever seen - a nod to a founding team whose experience sits in the difficult intersection of physics, manufacturing and software rather than in pure code.
Ceramics, materials science, then business - a background that spans the physics of a sensor and the market for it. Tacta sits exactly at that intersection.
Micro-LED at LuxVue and sensing at Locix both took years of quiet work before payoff. Pavate has repeatedly bet on technologies that mature slowly.
While others chase robot reasoning, Tacta targets dexterity - the unsolved skill of gripping, adjusting and handling the variable, fragile real world.
After a corporate career and two ventures, Tacta is Pavate's most ambitious swing yet - a new class of robots with human-like tactile ability.
Named inventor across materials, electronics and sensing - a paper trail of the deep-tech work behind each company he has helped build.
Beyond running Tacta, he serves as a strategic advisor to UTEC, the University of Tokyo's venture arm - a bridge between Silicon Valley and Japanese deep tech.