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§ Private Profile · Princeton, NJ, USA
Sensetics is a technology company.
Sensetics develops tactile sensing and haptic technologies, offering both hardware and software solutions to record, edit, and transmit touch. The company’s core products include AI-powered touch capture software, programmable fabrics, and advanced sensor-rich materials that integrate piezoelectrics and 3D metamaterials. These capabilities enable the digital capture and precise reproduction of tactile sensations.
Adam Hopkins and Rayne Zheng co-founded Sensetics in 2025, driven by the insight that human and machine touch interactions needed to enter the digital age. Their vision addressed a critical gap in accurately sensing and providing haptic feedback, laying the foundation for their specialized material science and software approach. Both founders brought expertise to build a system capable of digitizing the sense of touch.
The company's offerings serve various industries requiring accurate force sensing and haptic feedback. Sensetics aims to advance digital interaction by making touch a fully transmissible and reproducible medium. The long-term vision is to establish a new paradigm for how both humans and machines perceive and interact with the physical world through advanced tactile data.
Sensetics has raised $3.8M across 2 funding rounds.
Sensetics has raised $3.8M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Sensetics has raised $3.8M across 2 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $1.8M Pre-Seed in November 2025.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 13, 2025 | $1.8M Pre Seed | Mark Poag, Chris Alliegro | AIC Ventures, Blue SKY Capital | Announced |
| Feb 1, 2025 | $2M Seed | — | MetaVC Partners | Announced |
Sensetics has raised $3.8M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Sensetics's investors include Mark Poag, Chris Alliegro, AIC Ventures, Blue Sky Capital, MetaVC Partners.
# Sensetics: Digitizing Touch for the Physical AI Era
Sensetics is a haptics and touch data company that transforms how humans and machines interact by enabling touch to be recorded, edited, and transmitted as a digital sense.[1][2] Founded in 2024, the company has developed Touch Signature programmable fabrics paired with AI-powered touch capture and editing software that allows users to experience tactile feedback in real time from remotely operated devices, surgical tools, robots, and other equipment at the resolution of human nerve endings.[1] The company targets a market opportunity exceeding $10 billion across logistics, transportation, industrial automation, medical robotics, and VR/AR training platforms.[3]
Sensetics positions itself as a foundational enabler of physical AI—a paradigm where machines understand and respond to the world through visual, auditory, and tactile data simultaneously.[3] By digitizing touch, the company aims to create a market shift comparable to the digital transformation of audio and video, enabling machines to operate with human-level tactile intelligence in real-world settings.[2][3]
Sensetics was co-founded in 2024 by Adam Hopkins, a veteran advanced manufacturing founder and CEO with a Princeton PhD, and Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng, a UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.[1][2] The technology originated from research conducted at UC Berkeley and Virginia Tech, with additional inventors including William Dong, Desheng Yao, and Shuo Zhang.[1]
The founding team recognized a critical gap: while vision and sound have been digitized, touch—a core human sense—remained largely analog in digital and robotic contexts. This insight emerged at the intersection of accelerating robotics adoption, AI advancement, and growing demand for haptic feedback in healthcare, aerospace, and industrial applications.[3] The company raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding, with Fitz Gate Ventures and MetaVC Partners co-leading the round, validating early market interest in digital touch technology.[2][3]
Sensetics emerges at a pivotal moment where three forces converge: the explosion of robotic hardware deployment, the maturation of AI systems requiring richer sensory inputs, and the recognition that tactile data is essential for physical AI.[3] As enterprises automate warehouses, manufacturing, and surgical procedures, machines operating without touch feedback face fundamental limitations—they cannot adapt to unexpected textures, fragile objects, or complex manipulation tasks.
The company rides the broader wave of physical AI, where machine learning extends beyond digital domains (vision, language) into the physical world. Touch represents the final frontier of human-machine sensory parity. By creating a data platform for touch comparable to computer vision infrastructure, Sensetics positions itself as a critical infrastructure layer for the next generation of autonomous systems.[3] The timing is particularly acute as industries like healthcare (surgical robotics), logistics (delicate handling), and defense (remote operations) face urgent demand for tactile intelligence.
Sensetics has identified a genuine white space in the AI and robotics ecosystem. While computer vision and language models dominate headlines, the ability to digitize and transmit touch at scale remains largely unsolved—and increasingly essential. The company's early traction (pre-seed funding in 2024) and strong founding team suggest the market recognizes this opportunity.
The path forward hinges on three challenges: scaling programmable fabric manufacturing, proving durability and latency performance in demanding industrial environments, and establishing touch data as a standard input for AI training pipelines. If successful, Sensetics could become foundational infrastructure for physical AI, much as GPUs became essential for deep learning. Conversely, if competing approaches (alternative haptic sensors, different fabric technologies) prove superior, the company faces significant competition.
The broader implication is profound: touch digitization could unlock a new category of machine intelligence, enabling robots to handle fragile goods, surgeons to operate remotely with confidence, and workers to train on realistic tactile simulations. Sensetics' success would signal that the digital transformation of human senses is complete—and that machines are finally learning to feel.