Insider Brief
- Sensetics raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by MetaVC Partners and Fitz Gate Ventures, to accelerate development of its hardware-software platform for capturing, editing, and transmitting high-fidelity touch data.
- The company’s Touch Signature programmable fabrics and AI-powered tools enable fingertip-level tactile recording and streaming for applications in robotics, medical tools, wearables, remote sensors, and VR/AR training.
- Targeting a market opportunity exceeding $10 billion, Sensetics aims to make touch a fully digital sense for industries such as logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, and next-generation human-machine interaction.
PRESS RELEASE — Sensetics, a next generation haptics and touch data company advancing the digital capture and transmission of realistic touch experiences and bridging the machine and physical worlds by bringing touch to AI, announced it has raised $1.75M in pre-seed funding to accelerate product development efforts for its breakthrough hardware and software platform. The majority of the round was funded in the Spring, co-led by MetaVC Partners and Fitz Gate Ventures, with participation from Blue Sky Capital and AIC Ventures.
Sensetics’ platform, featuring its Touch Signature™ programmable fabrics and AI-powered touch capture and editing tools, enable users to record, edit, and replay touch experiences with high fidelity—similar to how we record and reproduce sight and sound. Originating from research at UC Berkeley and Virginia Tech, the technology replicates key mechanoreceptor functions in human fingertips. This allows real-time recording and transmission of tactile data from devices such as robotic arms, surgical tools, wearables, and remote sensors, at human fingertip-level resolution. Durable and low latency, Sensetics supports touch data streaming in a broad array of structured and unstructured environments, creating a new class of physical data for automation and AI control.
Sensetics is pursuing a market opportunity exceeding $10 billion, across sectors where accurate force sensing and haptic feedback are critical. Target industries include transportation and logistics, manufacturing, medical robotics, and VR/AR touch controllers for professional training and simulation. Digitizing touch – a sense as fundamental as sight and sound – will launch an entirely new market for Sensetics, comparable to the digital transformation of video and audio.
The founding team combines top entrepreneurial and academic expertise:
- Adam B. Hopkins, CEO – a veteran in high-tech startups and financial services; previously CEO and founder of Uniformity Labs; recognized inventor and scientific author.
- Rayne Zheng, CTO – Professor at UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Sensors & Actuators Center; published author in Nature and Science on materials, robotics, and AI.
“We see a pivotal moment at the intersection of human-machine interaction and touch technology,” said Hopkins. “Demand for haptic controllers and high resolution tactile sensors is surging in healthcare, industrial, aerospace, defense and robotics applications. Our mission is to make touch the next digital sense and to build a data platform for physical AI comparable in scale and importance to computer vision.”
“We’re excited to back Sensetics as it pioneers the next frontier of human-machine interaction,” said Chris Alliegro, Managing Partner at MetaVC Partners. “Digitizing touch is an extraordinarily complex challenge—one that Sensetics is solving through an elegant application of mechanical metamaterials. By unlocking high-fidelity tactile sensing and feedback, Sensetics is laying the foundation for a new generation of intelligent machines capable of perceiving and responding to the physical world with superhuman sensitivity and precision.”
“Sensetics squarely fits our investment thesis, because it is a deep tech company utilizing proprietary IP to create an entirely new industrial category that targets a massive market opportunity, and it has an outstanding founding team,” said Mark Poag, GP of Fitz Gate Ventures.
Image credit: Sensetics
