Last Updated: 1 October 2026
Tangent Robotics is a New York City robotics company developing dexterous robot hands for complex manipulation tasks. Spun out of Columbia Engineering’s Robotic Manipulation and Mobility Lab, it combines robotic touch sensing, hand design and robot learning to improve fine motor control.
Its technology targets manufacturing and industrial applications where robots need to handle objects with high precision. These include assembly, part handling, wiring, inspection, installation, maintenance and reassembly.
The founding team includes Pedro Piacenza, co-founder and CEO; Matei Ciocarlie, co-founder and Chief Science Officer; and Ioannis Kymissis, co-founder and consultant. Their earlier work at Columbia included the DISCO robot finger, which uses light to sense touch, robotic hands designed for NASA’s Assistive Free Flyer robots aboard the International Space Station, and a robotic hand capable of performing in-hand manipulation without relying on vision.
Tangent Robotics has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding, led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures. Logos Fund and Sparked Ventures also participated in the round.
Tangent will use the capital to develop robotic manipulation capabilities that combine hand hardware, touch sensing and motor learning, and to deploy the technology in demanding manufacturing environments.
A key goal is to reduce the amount of practice robots need before they can perform complex movements. Human fine motor skills can take many years to develop. Tangent aims to bring that learning period down to days and eventually hours.
Industrial robots already handle many repetitive jobs, including moving, sorting and positioning objects. More delicate manufacturing work requires finer control, especially when a robot has to insert connectors, place gaskets, thread parts or assemble gears.
Tangent’s fine motor skill layer combines information from touch sensors and vision with robotic hand movement and machine learning.
In practical terms, the system allows a robot to use touch and visual input to control precise physical movements during a task.
“Grippers and suction cups are effective in less delicate applications (pick & pack, sorting, etc.) but incompatible with a lot of economic activity. 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.”
Matt Wichrowski, Partner at Fly Ventures
The wider robotics sector is also moving toward systems that can learn and adapt instead of relying only on fixed, programmed movements. NVIDIA said in March 2026 that robotics companies including ABB Robotics, FANUC, Figure, KUKA and YASKAWA were using its technology to develop and deploy physical AI, with applications across that ecosystem including high precision electronics assembly.
Tangent has developed light based touch sensors for robot fingers, robotic hands that can track human fingertips, and data collection and machine learning methods for teaching robots precise movements.
Human demonstrations provide examples of how a task should be performed. The software then uses those examples to learn how to reproduce the movement autonomously.
The company has also demonstrated autonomous tasks using both vision and touch. These systems use imitation learning, a machine learning method in which robots learn from examples provided by a human operator.
Its robotic hands are not designed as mechanical copies of human hands.
“Trying to copy the human hand is a mistake akin to building flying machines with flapping wings. What we can do is build robot hands that are capable of dexterity even with non-human-like components or articulation."
Matei Ciocarlie, co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Tangent Robotics
The design instead focuses on the movement, sensing and control required for precise physical tasks.
Industrial robot adoption continues to rise. More than 600,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2025, an 11% increase from the previous year, while the number operating in factories reached 5 million, according to the International Federation of Robotics’ World Robotics 2026 report.
As more robots enter factories, automation is extending into tasks that are harder to handle with conventional grippers and suction systems. These include jobs that require accurate positioning, controlled contact and repeated adjustments during assembly.
Tangent is focused on this part of industrial automation, where fine motor control is required to complete high precision physical tasks.
Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures led the $4.5 million pre-seed round, while Logos Fund and Sparked Ventures also participated.
Fly Ventures invests in early stage technology companies. Toyota Ventures is Toyota’s early stage venture capital arm and invests in areas that include robotics, artificial intelligence and mobility.
“Tangent’s approach flips the script on traditional robotic manipulation. By engineering compliance primarily into the sensor stack rather than relying solely on the mechanics, they aim to deliver the high-fidelity touch needed for physical AI. Toyota Ventures is thrilled to support their pragmatic, hardware-first journey as they attempt to unlock a massive bottleneck in industrial assembly and help manufacturers automate their most stubborn tasks.”
David Sokolic, Partner at Toyota Ventures
