Genesis AI bets hands-first robotics: $105M seed, GENE-26.5 full-stack model

Genesis AI builds foundational AI for robots: the GENE foundation-model family trained across vision, tactile, proprioception and action data, plus the human-sized Genesis Hand, a wearable data-collection glove and simulation, aimed at general-purpose manipulation.

That human-level manipulation is robotics' core problem and scales only full-stack: human-sized hand, data gloves, simulation and a foundation model built together.

$105M seed co-led by Eclipse Ventures and Khosla Ventures (announced July 2025), with Bpifrance, HSG and individuals including Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Daniela Rus and Vladlen Koltun.

Genesis AI was created in early 2025 by Zhou Xian (CEO) and Théophile Gervet (president, formerly a research scientist at Mistral AI). Just months after founding, in July 2025, it emerged from stealth with a $105M seed round co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures — with Bpifrance, HSG, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Daniela Rus and Vladlen Koltun also in — to build a 'data engine' for training robot models.

The founders concluded a model alone could not reach human-level manipulation, so Genesis went full stack: it designed the human-sized Genesis Hand with partner Wuji Tech, added a lightweight sensor-loaded glove and egocentric video capture so daily jobs double as data collection, and built a simulation system to speed model iteration. In May 2026 it released GENE-26.5, its first foundation model, demoing cooking, lab pipetting, smoothie-making, wire harnessing and a Rubik's cube solve at 1x speed with one set of weights; the team grew to ~60 across Paris, California and London.

Over 80% of physical labor is manipulation and almost none of it has been recorded digitally, so data scarcity — not model architecture — is the bottleneck.

Closing the embodiment gap in hardware, with a 1:1 human-sized hand and soft-contact physics, makes human demonstrations transfer to robots without retargeting.

A wearable glove plus egocentric video means real jobs become data collection, unlocking a scale teleoperation setups cannot reach.

Going full stack removes dependence on third-party hardware that constrains what data can be collected, letting model and hand co-evolve.

If data is the bottleneck, don't wait for someone else's hardware: control the full stack — model, hand, glove and simulator — so real work becomes training data.

As of 2026-05-07, Genesis AI had publicly released GENE-26.5 and was planning to reveal its first general-purpose full-body robot shortly. The startup had ~60 employees across offices in Paris, California and London and was in talks with customers, positioning the data glove for fields like pharma and manufacturing; co-founder Gervet acknowledged open questions about whether workers would wear the sensors and how data sharing would be handled.