Genesis AI, a startup that raised a $105 million seed round to build foundational AI for robotics, has unveiled its first model, GENE-26.5, and it comes with surprise hands. In a demo video, the company showcased various advanced tasks performed by a set of robotic hands it has designed in-house.
“The model has always been the goal, because a better model means better intelligence,” Genesis cofounder and CEO Zhou Xian told TechCrunch. But the company soon realized that it needed control over the hardware. “So we decided to go full stack,” he said.
Other well-funded companies operate at the intersection of AI and robotics — such as Physical Intelligence and Skild AI. Zhian also acknowledged that “there’s probably 50 or 100 robotic hand companies out there.” But he and his cofounder Théophile Gervet hope that building their own will give them the upper hand.
The key difference is that Genesis’ hand has the same size and shape as a human hand — rather than the two-finger grippers many robotics companies have been using — reducing the gap with real-world conditions.
“That lets us collect a lot more data than was previously possible, to train a model that can do many more tasks,” said Gervet, a former research scientist at Mistral AI who is now Genesis’ president.
Of all the physical manipulation tasks showcased in the video below, Gervet’s personal favorite is cooking, because it proves that the robot has been able to complete a long series of difficult tasks, such as cracking an egg and slicing a tomato. But Genesis has also tasked its robots with preparing smoothies, playing the piano, and solving Rubik’s cube — a robotics gimmick.
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Other tasks, such as lab work, are closer to what could be the commercial applications of Genesis’ technology. But what happens behind the scenes is just as important: the startup has also developed a sensor-loaded glove that works as a real-life double of its robotic hand, collecting data that can more readily be used.
“Our idea was that if we coul …