Genesis AI has unveiled GENE-26.5, its first foundational robotics model, alongside a set of human-shaped robotic hands the company designed in-house. The startup raised a $105M seed in July 2025 co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, and is now showing what that money bought: a full-stack system where the model, the hand, and the data-collection glove are all built by the same team. CEO Zhou Xian framed the pivot bluntly — the model was always the goal, but the hardware had to come with it.
The demo video shows the hands cracking eggs, slicing tomatoes, preparing smoothies, playing piano, solving a Rubik's cube, and running lab work. Cofounder and president Théophile Gervet, a former research scientist at Mistral AI, singled out cooking as the most telling task because it chains long sequences of fine manipulation. Lab work is the one closest to a paying use case.
Genesis is wading into a crowded field. Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are both pursuing general-purpose robotics models, and Xian acknowledged there are "probably 50 or 100 robotic hand companies out there." Genesis's wager is that a hand sized and shaped like a human's — rather than the two-finger grippers most labs use — collapses the gap between human demonstration data and what a robot can actually replay.
Key facts
- 01Genesis AI revealed GENE-26.5, its first foundational robotics model, named for May 2026.
- 02The startup raised a $105M seed in July 2025, co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures.
- 03Genesis built its own five-fingered robotic hand and a matching sensor glove to collect human-task data.
- 04Headcount stands at 60, split 40-45% in Europe and 50-55% in the U.S., with offices in Paris, California, and London.
- 05Backers include Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Daniela Rus, Vladlen Koltun, Bpifrance, and HSG.
"That lets us collect a lot more data than was previously possible, to train a model that can do many more tasks," Gervet said. The companion piece is a sensor-loaded glove that mirrors the robotic hand. Xian said the design was meant to "instantly unlock huge amounts of human data without having to worry about what people call the 'embodiment gap' in robotics research."
“Genesis raised a $105M seed in July 2025, built its own human-shaped robotic hand, and now ships GENE-26.5 — a full-stack bet that the model and the hardware have to be designed together.”— Jaeden Schafer
The glove is also the commercial wedge. Gervet said it is as light as the safety gloves already worn in pharma labs and manufacturing, and cheap enough to deploy at scale. "We're in talks with a lot of customers right now, and a lot of the value of a glove would be that, for the first time, you can wear the data collection device when you're doing your daily job, whether it's a lab technician for pharma or for manufacturing," he said.
Whether workers will agree to wear cameras and instrumented gloves that train their replacements is a separate question. Asked whether employees would be paid for the data, Gervet said that would be a matter between Genesis's customers and their staff. "We haven't nailed the details yet," he said. Workers may also opt out, in which case Genesis says it can pay third-party partners to collect data instead. The current model is already trained on what the company calls "massive amounts of human-based internet videos," with no compensation mentioned.
GENE-26.5 is named for the month it shipped, and Xian expects rapid iteration. The lever is simulation. "The real bottleneck for the iteration speed of the model is evaluation," he said. "So this helps us speed up model training a lot." Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a Genesis investor, called the launch "an important milestone for their team and the robotics industry more broadly."
The cap table reflects the ambition. Alongside Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, the seed pulled in Bpifrance, HSG, and individual checks from Schmidt, French telecoms entrepreneur Xavier Niel, MIT roboticist Daniela Rus, and researcher Vladlen Koltun. Headcount has grown to 60, split 40-45% in Europe and 50-55% in the U.S. across Paris, California, and a new London office. "One big reason we decided to be in Europe is there is a huge talent density across the whole continent," Gervet said.
The skeptical read is that humanoid hands are a graveyard of startups, and that going full-stack means Genesis now has to win at three things — model, hardware, and data infrastructure — against rivals that have specialized in one. Physical Intelligence has more compute behind its model work; the 50 to 100 hand companies Xian referenced have years of mechanical iteration. A glove-based data network only matters if customers actually let their workers wear it, and that is a labor-relations problem the company has explicitly punted on.
Genesis says a full-body general-purpose robot is coming next, not just hands. The bet underneath GENE-26.5 is that the embodiment gap — the mismatch between human demonstration data and robot hardware — is the real bottleneck in robotics, and that owning the hand is the cheapest way to close it. If that's right, Genesis has a structural edge over model-only labs and hardware-only shops. If it's wrong, the company is carrying the cost of three roadmaps on a single seed round, and the next raise will have to fund all of them.
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