Chestnut Robotics
"We build the data-driven dexterous hand"
Santa Clara maker, founded 2025 as TetherIA, of 18-DOF and open-source dexterous hands plus a matched data-collection exoskeleton.
Chestnut Robotics, Inc. is a Santa Clara, California company that builds dexterous robot hands together with the data-collection hardware and software used to train them. The company operated as TetherIA, Inc. (tetheria.ai) from its founding in 2025 until December 2025, when it rebranded as Chestnut Robotics and announced it was leaving stealth. The company describes its product as "the data-driven dexterous hand" for advanced manufacturing.
The flagship Aero Hand is a human-hand-sized dexterous hand with 18 degrees of freedom and a hybrid tendon, direct and linkage drivetrain; the company lists sub-millimetre precision, 0.1 N tactile sensitivity, a 20 kg payload and a lifetime of more than 3 million cycles. Aero Hand Lite is a mass-produced, palm-scale, tendon-driven hand powered from industrial 24 V supplies; in April 2026 the company reported its first production units deployed on a partner's electronics assembly line, where it says the hand learns new SKUs by demonstration in under a shift. Aero Hand Open, released in October 2025, is an open-source, fully 3D-printable, tendon-driven, under-actuated hand with 7 active degrees of freedom across 16 joints, weighing 389 g and sold as a kit for about USD 314; it has a Python SDK, ROS 2 Humble support, MuJoCo simulation models, Apache 2.0 licensed firmware and SDK, and CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensed CAD files. Aero UMI is a data-collection exoskeleton with joint sensing by direct magnetic encoders at 0.1 degree accuracy, kinematically matched (URDF-matched) to the Aero Hand, used for human demonstration capture and teleoperation. GAIN3D is the company's data engine, which uses geometry-aware inpainting to convert human demonstration video into robot training data, which the company says removes the embodiment gap.
The co-founders are Yiwei (Evan) Tao, who led the Tesla Optimus dexterous hand project and was previously a lead mechanical designer at Apple, and Xu (Joe) Dong, formerly head of AI planning at XPeng and a member of Waymo's large-model team. The company says its team has shipped robots, semiconductor tools and consumer hardware, with backgrounds at Tesla, Apple, ASML, Intel, Zoox, Waymo and XPeng and universities including Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley, Princeton and UCLA. In 2025 the team numbered about 15 engineers.
As TetherIA, the company raised an angel round led by Matrix Partners China with participation from MiraclePlus. The Aero Hand Open was presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025 in Seoul, and the associated paper is published on arXiv.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Contact Chestnut Robotics
WEBSITE
https://chestnut.bot/HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2025
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
employees 10-50
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- Chestnut Robotics
- Inc.
- TetherIA
- dexterous hand
- tendon-driven hand
- open-source robot hand
- data-collection exoskeleton
- teleoperation
- human demonstration data
- robot foundation models
- ROS 2
- Manufacturer
- Component Supplier
- Software/Algorithm
- End-effector & Grasping
- Human-Machine Interaction
- Cloud & Data
- Manufacturing
- Education & Research
- Assembly
