Hemlock (YC F26) — Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
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.
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What it does Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI (source)
Example from a real report (our sample on Target): “Target eliminated approximately 1,800 corporate positions, with around 1,000 employees receiving layoff notices and the remainder accounted for by eliminating open roles.” Source: NBC News
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.
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Julian Olschwang
Founder/CEO
Founder at Hemlock. CMU Electrical and Computer Engineering dropout. Previously built GANs for military robotic data generation at the UCLA Biomechatronics Lab.
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One of 163 companies held here in Industrials › Manufacturing and Robotics.
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Example from a real report (our sample on Target): “Target eliminated approximately 1,800 corporate positions, with around 1,000 employees receiving layoff notices and the remainder accounted for by eliminating open roles.” Source: NBC News
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What the Full Report on Hemlock covers
The Short Answer
Which Company This Is
What They Do, And How The Money Works
Who Runs It, And How To Reach Them
The Money: Funding, Valuation, Runway
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Warning Bells
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