Proception: Rising Stronger After a Legal Battle with Tesla
Jay Li doesn’t recommend getting sued by Tesla if you’re trying to get a startup off the ground. But he thinks his company, Proception, might be better off after going through this experience.
A Test of Resilience
“I think it’s a bit like a resilience test or a pressure test,” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “People say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
Li, who was the technical lead for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program, was accused by his former employer last year of absconding with trade secrets to launch Proception. But after months of trading legal blows, he finally reached a settlement with Tesla, which dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)
Innovating Robotic Dexterity
Li is now free to tackle what he thinks will be an even more difficult problem: making robot hands function like a human’s.
To achieve this, Proception announced on Monday that it had raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator and seed fund BoxGroup.
Proception also announced Monday that it would ship the first batch of its “high dexterity robotic hand” to “robotics researchers and companies,” while opening up to larger orders. The goal, Li said, is to become the go-to supplier for other companies that don’t want to spend time or resources developing what’s known in the industry as “deft handling.”
The Challenge of Human-Like Robotic Hands
Although there has been an avalanche of money and attention in the world of robotics, Li believes it hasn’t been enough for robotic hands to truly mimic a human’s hands.
One of the loudest voices speaking out about this challenge is actually his former boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has said that robot hands are one of the biggest engineering problems yet to be solved.
Although Musk has argued that Optimus robots could begin operating in factories within a few years, the consensus view is that it will still take many years to make robotic hands equivalent to those of a human. Kevin Lynch, director of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University, told the Wall Street Journal last year that his team estimates it will be a decade before they are “functional, useful and capable of doing some of the things that humans do.”
Proception’s Unique Approach
Li thinks Proception can do this much faster, largely because of the way they collect data.
Most companies currently training humanoid robots use teleoperators to train their systems. A human wearing a virtual reality headset is able to see what a robot sees and manipulate what is in front of that robot, then the robot can learn commands given by the human.
According to Li, a big disadvantage of this approach is that the teleoperator does not receive feedback from the objects touched by the robot. This approach is also limited to the number of robots a company has at any given time, Li said.
Proception’s solution is a glove loaded with sensors. With human testers wearing gloves (and a headset), Proception and its customers can capture “human hand interaction data without the need for a robot in the loop,” according to Proception’s press release.
This same glove also applies to the hand that Proception develops, acting as its sensor-filled “skin”. The hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to allow for a “wide range of dexterous movements,” according to Proception.
Li said this approach will also allow Proception and its customers to collect more precise and task-specific data, which will allow its robotic hands to more accurately resemble those of a human. He also thinks it is better to expand it.
“You need both hardware and data, and those need to go hand in hand to get [dextrous manipulation] to work. Many companies focus only on hardware or like non-scalable hardware and data collection,” he said. “We are working on this very skillful hardware as well as highly scalable data. We think this is a key combination to solve this problem.”
Support from Investors
Bill Trenchard, first-round partner and head of investment in Proception, said that was one of the main reasons he backed Li.
“We think they will have the best hand in the market, perhaps the most sophisticated hand today, and the underlying data and models to support that,” he told TechCrunch. “Skillful manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole humanoid story going forward, and as a lot of people have said, it’s sort of the last mile for these robots to really perform.”
Trenchard also praised Li’s ability to keep a cool head while being sued by his former employer.
“He was very upfront with us when this came out, and I think the team did an incredible job of keeping their heads down,” Trenchard said. “Jay is a very strong leader.”
Li is also confident. After confronting Tesla’s “hardcore litigation department,” he told TechCrunch that he wouldn’t be surprised if the company called for help as Proception grew.
“I think it’s going to happen,” he said.
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