Digitizing Touch: This Startup Can Transmit Touch Over The Internet
We’ve digitized sight, and we’ve digitized sound. But touch, one of the most important human senses, has remained stubbornly physical and analog: almost impossible to replicate in machines. A new Princeton-based startup that just raised a $1.75 million pre-seed round says that gap may finally be closing. It’s built “programmable fabric” which in some ways surpasses the sensitivity of human touch, and offers huge opportunities for remote sensing, touch-sensitive VR training and humanoid robots.
“Sensetics is technology that is able to capture touch realistically at resolutions that exceed that of the nerve endings in our fingertips and take that data, digitize it,” Sensetics CEO Adam Hopkins told me on the TechFirst podcast. “Tor example I could touch something here and you could experience what I’m touching realistically where you are … half a thousand miles apart.”
The key innovation is a micron-scale programmable fabric built from metamaterials with embedded piezoelectric actuators and conductive pathways. These structures are engineered to emulate the full range of human mechanoreceptors: the touch-sensing cells in our fingertips that detect vibration, texture, pressure, stretch, and edges. The programmable fabric can, Hopkins says, sense at tens-of-microns resolution, respond at hardware speeds that are faster than visual processing, generate realistic haptic feedback and transmit touch data digitally.
That bidirectionality matters. It enables not just rich tactile sensing, but also the ability to play sensations back essentially in real time.
The first markets Sensetics plans to target are high-precision controllers for simulation, VR training, and virtual interaction. Here, touch can dramatically improve learning, realism and operator performance. For instance, a surgeon in training could feel exactly what it’s like to perform a specific operation. Or an aircraft mechanic could feel how hard a nut needs to be tightened.
“The third digital sense, touch, can add so much more in terms of productivity and interaction with information,” Hopkins says.
These applications would let the company commercialize early without the regulatory hurdles of medical devices.
Other potential markets include robotic control systems, embedding programmable fabrics into grippers and robot hands so machines can sense shear forces, pressure and texture in real time. This is critical in humanoid robots that are intended to work alongside humans and with objects that are human-centric, giving the robots the ability to know how hard they need to squeeze, or when an object is slipping, or whether a surface is soft or rigid.
Competing solutions in the market for digital touch are often from robotics or VR training companies. Sanctuary AI, for example, has teased technology that enables “compliant, sensitive, and durable sensors” for complex robotic fingers that it says can be manufactured cheaply. Xela in Japan offers “uSkin,” a three-axis tactile sensor with high density that can be used in flat and curved applications, and the Netherlands-based Senseglove offers haptic force feedback gloves for VR training or teleoperations.
Hopkins says the competition is almost steampunk or telegraph-level technology compared to Sensetics.
“It tends to be very mechanical age technology,” he says. “The off-access rotating motors and all those things that produce haptics today … it’s just way behind.”
Sensetics has some way to go, of course, before getting a competing product in the market.
Sensetics announced a pre-seed investment round of $1.75 million today to further develop the technology. The round was co-led by MetaVC Partners and Fitz Gate Ventures, with participation from Blue Sky Capital and AIC Ventures.
Hopkins told me that he expects products to be available in 2027 – fairly early for a pre-seed startup, but then again he’s not a first-time CEO – and a developer kit will be available “before then.”
