Founded by SUSTech Professor, Shenzhen Flexible Tactile Firm Secures Tens of Millions of Yuan in Pre-A++ Round｜Exclusive from QbitAI

Author: Huang Nan Editor: Yuan Silai QbitAI has learned that Sense Technology (赛感科技), a flexible tactile sensor company, has completed a Pre-A++ funding round worth tens of millions of yuan, led exclusively by Guangzhou Industrial Control. The funds will mainly go toward R&D of triboelectric flexible technology and the development and commercialization of next-generation products, while continuing cross-industry customer validation and expanding industrial market reach to accelerate penetration into multiple scenarios. As an industrial investor, Guangzhou Industrial Control is also providing the team with a concrete entry point into real-world applications. The first batch of orders has been confirmed and will be deployed in automotive manufacturing. This signals that the application boundaries of tactile sensors are extending beyond the embodied intelligence sector and gradually penetrating diverse scenarios such as industrial quality inspection and safety sensing. Sense Technology was founded in 2023 and its technology originates from the Ultra-Flexible Electronics Laboratory at Southern University of Science and Technology. The company focuses on the R&D, production, and sales of triboelectric flexible tactile sensors and robotic electronic skin, and has completed a full-chain technology layout spanning materials, devices, and systems. Founder and Chief Scientist Guo Chuanfei is a tenured professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at SUSTech and a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. He has deep expertise in flexible electronics and has applied for more than 40 patents. CEO Xiong Gengchao has years of industrialization experience within the Haier ecosystem. The team includes more than 20 PhD holders and postdoctoral researchers. [Image caption: Dexterous hand equipped with Sense Technology's tactile sensors (Source: company)] The position of tactile sensing in embodied intelligence has shifted from an "optional" to a "mandatory" consensus. "Last year we still had to explain to customers why robots need touch, but since March this year, that is no longer a question that needs arguing. The real debate has moved to another level: how exactly tactile signals should be used," said Xiong Gengchao, CEO of Sense Technology. The real engineering challenges have only just begun. One fact must be acknowledged: tactile and visual sensing are not aligned in time scale. Visual updates typically occur at a lower frequency, while tactile feedback requires higher frequencies to support closed-loop control. Simply concatenating tactile information into vision-dominant VLA models can cause frequency mismatches, where touch may fail to add value and may even interfere with existing decision-making. Touch is not an auxiliary channel to vision. It requires independent data streams, processing frequencies, and model interfaces. This means that integrating tactile signals into embodied foundation models is far more than adding an input channel. It requires solving, at the data pipeline level, how to remain compatible with the time scale of vision while preserving the high-frequency nature of touch. To