6thSense
"The touch layer for dexterous robots"
San Francisco YC S26 startup capturing tactile, egocentric hand-manipulation data with in-house wearable sensors to train dexterous robots.
6thSense is a San Francisco robotics data startup in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch. It designs and manufactures wearable tactile sensing rigs that record how human hands interact with objects (pressure, contact, grip and hand pose) and sells the resulting multimodal datasets to companies training dexterous robot hands and manipulation models. Its YC profile tagline is "Nervous System for Physical AI"; the website uses "The touch layer for dexterous robots".
Hardware. The company's website lists two capture devices:
- Skin: a wearable tactile sensor with 464 channels that records touch as force. The company says its tactile arrays are designed as a one-to-one analogue of the tactile arrays in next-generation robot hands, so human demonstrations map directly onto robot sensing.
- Eye2 Pro: an egocentric stereo camera that records first-person video synchronised with the touch data.
Press coverage describes the system as a tactile data glove plus egocentric camera that records eight time-synchronised streams, including tactile pressure, egocentric RGB video, RGB-D depth, 3D hand pose, motion/IMU data and multi-camera views, with calibration, quality verification and labelling automated in the pipeline. The company also mentions custom tactile robot skin and model-ready tactile datasets as offerings. Data is collected in real environments such as homes rather than labs; Korean press reports collection at manufacturing sites in Vietnam, India and China. The website cites research suggesting that adding touch raises robot task success from about 50 percent with vision alone to over 80 percent.
Team. YC lists four founders: James Baek (CEO; Georgia Tech biomedical engineering and biochemistry, former founding member at Ibebu, US Army), Ronak Agarwal (CTO; previously machine learning at Amazon and production infrastructure at DoorDash), Alex Hyungwoo Noh (COO; University of Chicago computer science and economics) and Matt Wulff (CPO; previously led vision-guided robotics at Tesla and tactile data capture at Mecka AI). The team is four people according to YC.
Funding and customers. The company raised a pre-seed round from Krew Capital, reported as about KRW 1 billion (roughly USD 660,000), in addition to YC. Its website also lists the NVIDIA Inception Program among supporters. No customers are named; Korean press reports that a first design partner received one hour of sample data, proposed a contract worth about USD 1 million and was running a proof of concept with the company.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Skin wearable tactile sensor
Wearable 464-channel tactile sensor that records touch as force during human manipulation, designed to mirror tactile arrays in robot hands.
Eye2 Pro egocentric stereo camera
Head-worn egocentric stereo camera capturing first-person video synchronised with Skin tactile data for robot-learning datasets.
Tactile egocentric manipulation datasets
Model-ready multimodal datasets of human hand manipulation (touch, vision, depth, force, 3D hand pose) captured in real homes and workplaces for dexterous robot training.
More related news
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
-
5
Suzy Teele’s Mission at ARM Institute RobotToday · Oct 13, 2026
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
Contact 6thSense
WEBSITE
https://6thsense.devHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2025
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- 6thSense
- SixSense
- tactile data glove
- egocentric video
- dexterous manipulation data
- tactile sensor array
- hand pose capture
- robot learning datasets
- Y Combinator S26
- Skin 464-channel sensor
- Eye2 Pro
- Software/Algorithm
- Manufacturer
- Cloud & Data
- Perception & Vision
- Human-Machine Interaction
- Education & Research
- Research Platform
