Ant Group leads Juqiao's RMB 100 million-level round as its fabric tactile gloves near 10,000 units

Juqiao Industries, a company in Weihai, Shandong, that weaves pressure-sensing fibers into fabric "electronic skin," has closed an RMB 100 million-level Series A led by Ant Group, NetEase Smart reported on Oct. 29. Existing shareholders Lingyi Ventures, Weihai Gangrong and Qingdao Hexin also put in more. Ant's arrival was already on file: business records reported on Sept. 16 showed a wholly owned Ant subsidiary joining Juqiao's shareholders.

Juqiao sells the idea of skin for robots, but its own numbers put human hands first. More than 200 of its 400-plus customers work in embodied AI, and it has delivered nearly 10,000 tactile gloves, according to an article on 36Kr. In that article, people wear the glove while they work, and it records where they touch and how hard alongside first-person video, so the data can train robot models. Ant is backing the glove side of an open argument about where robots will get their sense of touch.

Hundreds of sensing points per hand, at 0.01 N

The full-palm glove carries hundreds of sensing points on each hand, spaced as close as 2 mm, and responds to forces as small as 0.01 N, the company says. It works with motion capture and teleoperation rigs. Juqiao gives a linear formula that turns each point's raw reading into a force value, with consistency of about ±5%, and says its multilayer sensors are under 0.8 mm thick. Yield on its Weihai line is above 95%. It says the glove data is used in several frontier-model research projects in China and abroad, without naming them, and that it is building a collection system that pairs tactile sensing with first-person vision.

Skin on robots comes second. Juqiao has launched skin for robot arms and plans torso and foot-sole versions. NetEase Smart reports that it supplies tactile gloves for dexterous hands and works with Unitree and AgiBot. Mattresses, nursing pads and car-seat pressure sensing make up the rest of the business, and the seat product has reached volume delivery in cars. The new money goes to scaling fabric e-skin production, tactile and multimodal R&D, and those robot, home and care products.

Gewu Tongzhi is betting on video instead

On Oct. 18, Hangzhou startup Gewu Tongzhi raised nearly RMB 100 million on the opposite claim. Its CEO called glove collection expensive and slow, and said it gets in workers' way. Gewu plans to reconstruct touch signals from ordinary video and calibrate them with real force and tactile readings. If that works for pretraining, gloves become calibration tools. If it does not, Juqiao's 10,000 gloves are a head start.