Tactile sensor firm Tashan Tech closes hundreds of millions yuan in Series B

Source: HeShan Technology Author: Yang Song | Editor: Tan Lu

In Qianjiang, Hubei—a region famous for its crayfish—a smart device designed specifically for peeling crayfish has gained popularity, achieving a success rate of 95%. The technology behind it comes from HeShan Technology, a company specializing in tactile perception.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Beijing, HeShan Technology enables machines to perform delicate operations—whether peeling crayfish or picking up a cup of coffee. Now, the company finds itself at the forefront of the robotics boom.

Market Momentum

Fu Yihui, Vice President of Marketing and Ecosystem at HeShan Technology, told 21 Venture Capital that the company's monthly delivery volume of tactile sensors has reached tens of thousands of units. Orders from January to June exceeded the total volume for the entire previous year by four times.

The company's projected annual revenue is expected to reach several hundred million yuan.

In July, HeShan Technology completed a Series B financing round worth several hundred million yuan, with investors including Taiping Innovation and Joyson Electronics. This marked the company's third funding round within six months, and it has already initiated a new round of financing.

By mid-September, HeShan Technology had just completed its shareholding reform. When asked about the IPO timeline, the company responded that it would proceed at a normal pace.

Seizing the Opportunity

Since its inception, HeShan Technology has focused on robotic tactile perception technology. At the time, the industry had yet to reach a consensus on its development prospects, and commercial applications were mainly concentrated in automotive and consumer electronics.

By 2023, demand for tactile capabilities in the robotics industry began to heat up, and the team caught the wave of embodied intelligence.

"Starting in 2024, downstream robot manufacturers gradually realized the importance of tactile functions," Fu Yihui told 21 Venture Capital.

He explained that when robot manufacturers first identified the need for tactile capabilities, their initial reaction was to develop tactile modules in-house. However, they soon discovered that this niche field involves complex disciplines such as electrical signal chips and material structures.

Subsequently, many robot manufacturers abandoned self-development and turned to external procurement. Tactile sensors gradually became a standard component for dexterous hands.

Robots rely on tactile modules to accurately perform actions such as grasping and assembly. For example, the TS-R tactile perception service robot, which integrates HeShan's tactile technology with Yunjie Technology's multimodal mobile platform, can precisely sense and adjust the force when handing over objects, enabling human-like service actions such as handing over a cup of water or a microphone.

Tactile devices are core components of dexterous hands, which cost tens of thousands of yuan, accounting for 10% to 20% of the BOM (Bill of Materials) cost.

Orders for HeShan Technology have subsequently surged. Currently, hundreds of thousands of tactile fingertips are applied to various humanoid robots worldwide, with HeShan holding an 80% market share.

The company has established partnerships with over 200 domestic and international clients, including humanoid robot manufacturers such as Galaxy General, Independent Variable, and Xingdong Era, as well as leading dexterous hand companies like InTime Robotics, BrainCo, and Dexterous Intelligence.

In non-robotics sectors, such as the automotive industry, the company has entered the supply chains of companies like BYD. In consumer electronics, according to Fu Yihui, orders from a single client in 2025 increased 20-fold compared to 2024.

Diversified Layout

In addition to selling tactile products, HeShan Technology is also cultivating a tactile data business.

In June 2025, the company built and open-sourced a tactile simulation model based on the open-source physics simulation engine MuJoCo, in collaboration with NVIDIA's Isaac Sim platform.

On the hardware front, the company developed the TS-ECHO tactile perception fingertip sleeve, which supports 3D force and proximity sensing, covering the complete interaction process from "approach" to "contact" to "pressure and slip," enabling tactile data to enter the embodied intelligence training pipeline.

In terms of tactile perception algorithms, the company has also solved the global technical challenge of simultaneously parsing multi-dimensional tactile perception signals.

In May of this year, HeShan Technology, together with Turing Award winner Richard Sutton, established a "Robot Kindergarten," which officially opened in September.

"The robot kindergarten is a platform that allows robots to learn through experience or self-learning," Fu Yihui explained. In human development, learning to crawl and walk involves interacting with the physical world through touch.

For the company, this is a long-term R&D project that will explore innovative pathways for autonomous robot evolution, based on tactile perception technology combined with reinforcement learning theory.

Leveraging its "chip-sensor-algorithm model-scenario application" technology system, HeShan's data business has grown rapidly.

In 2026, the company established two major tactile data collection centers—one in Beijing's Shijingshan District and the other in Qianjiang, Hubei—with tactile perception as the core.

The most notable case is the intelligent crayfish peeling equipment in Qianjiang, Hubei. Local leading crayfish tail manufacturers spend nearly 100 million yuan annually on labor during peak season.

Now, the smart equipment, equipped with the company's self-developed tactile perception technology, possesses human-like "touch," achieving a 95% success rate in peeling crayfish while preserving the roe, resulting in higher-grade finished crayfish tails.

Fu Yihui noted that crayfish companies from other regions have also approached them for business discussions, and the company has already received orders worth tens of millions of yuan.

There are many other tactile-intensive scenarios: wire harness inspection, USB port detection, optical module quality inspection, and the handling and sorting of soft trays in the consumer battery industry.

These tasks, which previously relied solely on manual dexterity, now have pilot cases involving robotic operation.

Staying True to Tactile Perception

Over the past nine years, HeShan Technology has not chased every "seemingly more attractive" trend—it did not build robot bodies or dexterous hands.

Today, in the eyes of investors, HeShan's technology has a wide range of applications, "empowering thousands of industries with tactile capabilities." Fu Yihui stated that, in addition to the popular embodied intelligence sector, the company's revenue from automotive and consumer electronics is growing rapidly.

The company's technological moat lies in its chips.

In its early days, the company assembled a team with experience in tactile sensor development and electronic engineering, bringing together senior R&D personnel from top universities such as Tsinghua University and the University of Manchester, with a focus on tactile chips.

According to Fu Yihui, the company successfully completed its first tape-out as early as 2019 and achieved mass production in 2023.

In the first few years, before the embodied intelligence industry took off, HeShan focused on automotive and consumer electronics.

"When the embodied intelligence wave emerged, our underlying tactile-specific chips were already in mass production," Fu Yihui said. In the tactile field, HeShan is one of the few manufacturers that insists on self-developing underlying chips.

As demand from the robotics sector surged, the company increased its R&D investment in this area.

In July 2026, HeShan Technology released the world's first dynamic tactile perception chip, the Emerald E10A. It is the first chip to use a self-developed ASC (Analog-to-Spike Converter) module to directly convert tactile signals into pulse signals.

This architecture bypasses the lengthy traditional process of converting analog signals to pulse signals via software, using event-driven, sparse computation to achieve microsecond-level temporal resolution and ultra-low power consumption.

Currently, R&D personnel account for over 70% of the company's workforce.

Benefiting from the dividends of embodied intelligence, HeShan Technology's revenue continues to climb. In 2025, its revenue exceeded 100 million yuan, and in 2026, it is expected to reach several hundred million yuan.

Fu Yihui revealed that leading overseas robot manufacturers have indicated that by 2027 to 2028, some scenarios will begin to scale up, and robots will start entering household environments.

He estimates that the tactile market alone is worth tens of billions of yuan, and HeShan aims to target even higher revenue goals.