After years of development, dexterous robotic manipulation is improving, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. Genesis AI today unveiled GENE-26.5, which it claimed gives robots “human-level physical manipulation capabilities.”

The San Carlos, Calif.-based company also announced a system to “unlock unlimited amounts of data” and train GENE-26.5 at scale. It combines two proprietary components: a new data engine and a human-scale robotic hand that enables direct skill transfer from humans to robots.

“Together, these innovations overcome the fundamental bottleneck in data that has constrained robotics foundation models, paving the way for a new generation of highly productive general-purpose robots,” asserted Genesis AI.

“The brain and hand are the two most valuable and complex pieces of robotics, and today we are presenting the industry’s most advanced versions of both,” stated Zhou Xian, co-founder and CEO of Genesis AI. “For the first time ever, we’re enabling robots to do what only human hands could, and do it reliably, at scale.”

The startup emerged from stealth with $105 million in funding last year. Genesis AI said it is a “global full-stack robotics company building general-purpose robots with human-level intelligence and capabilities.”

GENE-26.5 designed for complex robot tasks

“GENE-26.5 is an AI foundation model, purpose-built for robotics and designed to absorb massive amounts of data and environments,” said Genesis AI. It is intended to enable robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks with human-level dexterity. The company said GENE-26.5 is a step toward a future where robots can be quickly deployed and adapt to new environments and unfamiliar tasks.

To demonstrate GENE-26.5’s performance, Genesis AI released a video of its system demonstrating fluid, human-like dexterity and precise, coordinated hand movements for complex tasks:

• Cooking a 20-step meal, including chopping tomatoes, cracking an egg with one hand, and coordinating two hands
• Preparing a smoothie, including handling ingredients, pouring, blending, and mid-air serving with coordinated hand control
• Conducting high-precision lab experiments with delicate instrumentation including pipetting, liquid transferring, and mid-air manipulation
• Wire harnessing, arranging and securing wires into organized bundles, which Genesis AI said is one of the most difficult tasks in electronics and electrical engineering
• Solving a Rubik’s Cube, using continuous in-air manipulation requiring coordinated, high-speed reasoning and precise wrist control
• Single-handed multi-object grasping, simultaneously handling four objects of varying  sizes and sorting them into designated bins
• Playing the piano at a human level, performing an ultra-fast, highly complex composition.

Genesis AI said it has proven that GENE-26.5 can empower robots with a wide range of complex skills and a level of physical manipulation that was not possible before.

“General-purpose robotics stands to reshape the global economy while opening an entirely new chapter for AI,” said Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and an investor in Genesis AI. “Genesis is introducing a paradigm shift in robotics. This marks an important milestone for their team and the robotics industry more broadly.”

Robotic gripper mirrors the human hand

“The embodiment gap, or the difference between the human form and robotic form, has always drastically limited robots’ performance and ability to learn from human data,” noted Genesis AI.

The company has addressed those limitations with its proprietary hardware that matches the human hand. The end effector mirrors the human hand in form and function, and it pairs with a data-collection glove equipped with tactile-sensing electronic skin.

“When worn by a human, the glove allows for a 1:1:1 mapping between the glove itself, the human’s hand and the robotic hand,” according to Genesis AI. “This allows humans to seamlessly provide GENE-26.5 with high-quality data at scale that translates into robotic skills. The result is natural, human-like movement that generalizes reliably across complex physical tasks, use cases and environments.”

Editor’s note: At the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo this month in Boston, there will be keynotes, sessions, and exhibits on embodied and physical AI. Register now to attend.

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Low-cost hardware to enable data collection to scale

Genesis AI also said that its glove is 100 times cheaper than typical hardware cost and that it has demonstrated up to five times greater data-collection efficiency than traditional teleoperation methods in internal testing. It said this approach allows for affordable and continuous, large-scale robotics training.

The company said it is engaging with partners to deploy the glove in real-world work environments. By simply wearing the glove while working as usual, everyday tasks can be sources of new categories of training data to build what Genesis AI said could be the world’s largest human skill library.

In addition, Genesis AI’s data engine taps into egocentric video data from humans wearing cameras to capture how they interact with the world, as well as massive amounts of human-based internet videos. The company said its approach will use these data sources to enable its foundation model to learn more efficiently and allow robots to perform more complex tasks.

“At Genesis, we believe winning in robotics requires excellence at every level,” said Theophile Gervet, co-founder and president of Genesis AI. “That’s why we’re obsessed with innovating across the full-stack, from AI to hardware. By controlling every layer, we can build a cohesive system and solve the problem holistically. Our approach gives us a huge competitive advantage by harnessing unprecedented amounts of data as that ultimately defines what foundation models can achieve.”

GENE uses simulation to accelerate training

“Robot development has always been one of the most manual processes in engineering,” said Genesis AI, which has developed a simulation system to narrow the sim-to-real gap, or difference between reality and virtual worlds. It said its rendering engine and hyper-realistic physics will create accurate and reliable representations of actual conditions so that robots perform tasks like they would in the real world.

This level of simulation will accelerate the development, testing, and improvement of its robotic AI stack, the company claimed. Teams can train and evaluate models much faster than with traditional physical testing, which is often slow, expensive and difficult to scale, Genesis AI said.

“Genesis is changing the trajectory of robotics, bringing us closer to AI that can operate in the real world,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and a Genesis AI investor. “Genesis’s groundbreaking foundation model powered by its human-centric data engine and its first-of-its-kind simulation are poised to dramatically increase development speeds and enable instant deployment with commercial customers.”

Genesis AI said it will soon reveal its first general-purpose robot based on the technology unveiled today. The company is backed by Eclipse, Bpifrance and HSG, as well as technology visionaries such as Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel and AI pioneers Daniela Rus and Vladlen Koltun.

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