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Hemlock

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. 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.
Active Founders
Julian Olschwang
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.
Jobs at Hemlock
Los Angeles, CA, US / San Francisco, CA, US
$50K - $100K
5.00% - 10.00%
Any (new grads ok)
San Francisco, CA, US / Remote
$2K - $5K
1+ years
Hemlock
Founded:2025
Batch:Fall 2026
Team Size:1
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Nicolas Dessaigne