Origami Robotics

Origami Robotics is a San Francisco robotics company building a "manipulate anything" model together with the hardware that embodies it. Its two core products are a high-degree-of-freedom, direct-drive robotic hand with in-joint motors and a hand-based data-collection glove that is co-designed to match the hand exactly. The stated purpose of this exact hardware correspondence is to remove the embodiment gap — differences in kinematics, contact behavior and sensing between human and robotic hands — so that manipulation data recorded by a human wearing the glove can be used to train policies that deploy directly on the robotic hand without translation between physical forms.

The company's plan is to scale real-world manipulation data by placing its devices in working environments such as manufacturing plants and logistics centers, using the resulting data to train its manipulation model, and then delivering automation solutions back to those industries. It positions its approach around reusable, transferable skills and replayable robot actions applicable to reconfigurable work cells, rather than task-specific programming. Alongside hardware sales, it offers previously collected hours of low-embodiment-gap real-world data for policy training. The company also publishes technical writing, including a February 2026 post arguing that high-ratio gearboxes in conventional robotic hands harm sim-to-real transfer and force transparency and are the first components to wear out.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Quanting (Daniel) Xie encountered two recurring obstacles while studying robot manipulation during his PhD at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute: no existing robotic hand designed for learning, and a shortage of high-quality manipulation data. He identified large transmissions in existing hands as making their dynamics hard to model, and the embodiment gap between human and robotic hands as making training data too distributionally distant from deployment. He teamed with his brother Ryan Xie, a serial hardware and robotics entrepreneur who serves as Founder/COO, to build their own hardware — optimizing miniature motor design and co-designing the data-collection glove with the robotic hand — as a way to scale high-quality dexterous manipulation data.

Business model

Origami Robotics develops and sells dexterous robotic hardware while building an accompanying general-purpose manipulation model. It sells robotic hands to physical AI labs, and describes an intended path of deploying its data-collection devices and hands in operating environments such as factories and logistics centers to gather manipulation data, training its model on that data, and then supplying automation solutions to those industries. It also offers customers access to the manipulation data it has collected for training their own policies.

Revenue comes from sales of its robotic hands to physical AI labs, with planned automation solutions for manufacturing and logistics customers and access to its collected manipulation data for model training.

Traction

The company reports selling its robotic hands to physical AI labs including Amazon, and says it has collected thousands of hours of real-world manipulation data with minimal embodiment gap. It is a five-person team in the Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch and is hiring for three full-time roles and two internships in San Francisco.