Ex-Tesla Optimus engineer settles trade secret lawsuit and raises $11M to build robot hands

Proception, a robotics startup founded by ex-Tesla Optimus engineer Jay Li, has settled a year-long trade secret lawsuit with Tesla and raised an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital. The company is now shipping its first dexterous robotic hands — featuring 22 degrees of freedom and a sensor-laden glove for scalable training data collection — to researchers and robotics companies. Tesla had sued Li in June 2025, alleging he downloaded confidential files before leaving to found Proception. The dexterous hand market is heating up globally, with competitors like China's Linkerbot dominating market share and European and Chinese startups raising hundreds of millions. Proception is betting that humanoid robot makers will outsource hand manufacturing rather than build in-house, positioning itself as a key supplier in the emerging humanoid robot supply chain.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/proception-robot-hand-tesla-trade-secret-settlement-seed-round. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.