YaoLe Tech Secures Pre-A+ Funding for Tactile Sensing Gloves
YaoLe Tech, a company specializing in flexible tactile sensing technology, has successfully completed a Pre-A+ funding round led by Dinghe Gaoda, with participation from listed companies Changshu Auto Parts and Zulong Entertainment. Cloud Dao Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. The newly acquired capital will be allocated to research and development of flexible fabric sensor technology, product performance upgrades, scaling up production of data gloves, and enhancing data collection, calibration, and interface capabilities. These advancements aim to accelerate the application of YaoLe's technology in areas such as embodied AI, world models, and intelligent automotive cockpits.
YaoLe Tech's core innovation lies in embedding sensing capabilities directly into fabric structures, creating an integrated material and device. Unlike conventional data gloves that often use separate sensor layers attached to fabric, leading to issues like displacement and sweat interference in real-world scenarios, YaoLe's proprietary "metal yarn + sandwich matrix" sensor design weaves metal alloy yarns into a conductive network within a multi-layer fabric matrix. This approach ensures a more durable and consistent conductivity, with high-density sensing arrays on the palm and fingers for precise data acquisition. The integrated design eliminates signal errors caused by layer slippage and prevents false triggers from fabric wrinkles, significantly improving data reliability.
Lu Liyun, Founder and CEO of YaoLe Tech, previously served as Chief Architect Engineer at Harman, a leading automotive electronics company. The company's core team comprises graduates from top institutions like the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Michigan, and Peking University, possessing comprehensive R&D capabilities from sensor materials to intelligent algorithms. The company anticipates its data glove business to constitute over half of its revenue by 2026, with total revenue projected to increase tenfold. YaoLe Tech's business model extends beyond hardware, offering data collection, cleaning, calibration, and time-alignment services to reduce model training costs for clients. The company views data gloves as a consumable item, prioritizing data accuracy within its lifespan over extreme durability, aiming for affordability and replaceability to meet user needs.
The funding secured by YaoLe Tech highlights a significant market shift towards the critical need for high-quality, real-world physical interaction data, particularly tactile data, for training advanced AI models like embodied AI and world models. The report identifies a substantial data gap, estimating a need for tens of millions of hours of data versus the current availability of only 500,000 hours by early 2026. YaoLe's fabric-integrated sensor technology addresses a key bottleneck in tactile data acquisition, which cannot be effectively replicated by simulations due to the complexity of physical contact forces and material deformations. The company's focus on a modular, washable design and integrated data processing services suggests a strategy to overcome the practical challenges of large-scale data collection, positioning its data gloves as a more accessible and sustainable solution compared to existing, less robust methods. This approach aligns with the evolving AI landscape where the ability to generate and process real-world physical interaction data is becoming a foundational requirement, potentially creating new value chains in human-robot interaction and industrial applications.
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