Hemlock
New accelerator entry · 2026-08-11 · the record
In their words
Every serious robotics lab is bottlenecked on the same thing: demonstration data. The field has converged on egocentric video and hand pose as the substrate, and both are now cheap to collect at scale. What neither of them contains is force. A video of someone picking up an egg and a video of someone picking up a rock are nearly identical in pixel space and nearly identical in joint angles. They differ almost entirely in a quantity nobody is recording. Policies trained without it learn geometry and inherit no sense of touch. Hemlock closes that gap at the source. Our device, the Bracelet, is a wrist-worn surface EMG band that reads the electrical activity of the forearm muscles that actually drive the hand, which means it recovers contraction force directly rather than inferring it from motion. This distinction is the whole thesis: force cannot be reconstructed downstream of kinematics, because a hand squeezing hard isometrically and a hand resting can occupy the identical pose. Muscle signal is the only non-invasive channel that separates them.
What the record says
Hemlock lists 2 open roles on its directory entry.
Founders, titles and bios as the company published them. Photographs are our own copies of the ones on that record, so they do not break when the original link expires.
Against the 29 companies on file from Fall 2026. Median team 2, largest 6.
The nearest companies on file from the same batch, side by side with this one.
| Company | Batch | Sectors | Listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreamscale Labs | Fall 2026 | Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Infrastructure | 2026-09-05 |
| Sinter | Fall 2026 | 3D Printing, Manufacturing, Advanced Materials | 2026-09-05 |
| Hopper | Fall 2026 | Infrastructure, AI | 2026-09-04 |
| OnePatch | Fall 2026 | DevOps, Automation, AI | 2026-09-03 |
| Orca Aerospace | Fall 2026 | AIOps, Space Exploration, Satellites | 2026-09-02 |
| Hemlock (this page) | Fall 2026 | Hard Tech, Hardware | 2026-08-11 |
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