Columbia spinoff Tangent Robotics raises $4.5M for robot dexterity
What's the deal? Tangent RoboticsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Columbia UniversityDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → spinoff developing fine motor skills for robot hands, has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding. Fly VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Toyota VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round, with Logos FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Sparked Ventures participating.
What's the endgame? The company builds precise light-based touch sensors for robot fingers, hands that track human fingertips, and machine learning methods that combine into a "fine motor skill layer" for autonomous dexterity. The aim is to handle delicate manufacturing tasks — assembly, threading, connector mating, gear meshing — that today's robots can't perform.
Why now? Grippers and suction cups work for simple picking and sorting but fall short on complex manipulation. "The fine motor control needed for more complex manipulation is an incredibly difficult technical challenge, but one that the Tangent team has spent their entire career focused on," said Matt Wichrowski, partner at Fly Ventures.
The founding team spun out of Columbia Engineering's Robotic Manipulation and Mobility Lab. It includes co-founders Pedro Piacenza, robotics professor Matei Ciocarlie, and electronics expert Ioannis Kymissis. At Columbia, the team built the DISCO robot finger, which senses touch via light, and a robot hand capable of in-hand dexterity in the dark — named one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2023.
The company will use the funds to develop skilled manipulation capabilities and deploy them in demanding manufacturing environments. It is not trying to replicate the human hand. "Trying to copy the human hand is a mistake akin to building flying machines with flapping wings," Ciocarlie said. "What we can do is build robot hands that are capable of dexterity even with non-human-like components or articulation."
Tangent aims to cut the practice time robots need to learn such skills to days, and then hours.
The signal: At $4.5 million, the round sits in the top quartile of pre-seed deals by size — a sign of investor appetite for robotics startups tackling the "last mile" of physical manipulation that general-purpose AI models leave unsolved.
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Image credit: Generated with Gemini
