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Tacta Systems™ Unveils Breakthrough Robotic Hands For High-Value Manufacturing, Powered By Dexterous Intelligence And Large-Scale Skill Capture

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The TactaBot™ combines the company’s Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and “Dexterous Intelligence” AI engine to bring human-level dexterity and touch to robotics for the first time.The Tacta Hand delivers unprecedented dexterity, precision, strength, and industrial-grade reliability over millions of cycles, finally unlocking high-value tasks for robotics.The company will deploy the technology with best-in-class manufacturers across the electronics, AI infrastructure, and automotive industries in early 2027.

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tacta Systems, a company that is pioneering Dexterous Intelligence for robotics, today unveiled its technology for the first time. The company’s first product, the TactaBot™, is made up of three groundbreaking components—the Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and a Dexterous Intelligence AI model—that work together seamlessly to create the world’s most capable, scalable, and adaptable robotic hands for high-value work. The TactaBot is already in high demand among the world’s largest electronics, AI Infrastructure, and automotive manufacturers.

With these advances, Tacta is solving three of the hardest problems in robotics. First, the Tacta Hand finally achieves the dexterity, precision, and strength needed to perform high-value manufacturing tasks, with a design that sustains that level of performance for millions of factory cycles. Second, with its Dexterous Intelligence AI engine and sensory system, Tacta is imbuing robots with a human-level sense of touch, without which it is impossible to automate high-value tasks in manufacturing. The company’s Skill Capture system, powered by the Tacta Glove™, is the third breakthrough, enabling it to build the world’s most complete dataset for dexterous tasks and rapidly teach robots new skills.

The Tacta Hand With Fluidic Tendon™ Actuation

Tacta Hands are based on the company’s proprietary Fluidic Tendon actuation technology, a design that far surpasses traditional motor- and cable-driven alternatives. The human-scale hands include 15 independently actuated joints, each capable of human-like precision along with the strength and speed required for industrial tasks. This novel actuation technology is serviceable in minutes and reliable for millions of cycles in factory-level conditions.

The World’s Most Advanced Tactile Sensor

To provide Tacta Hands with the ability to touch and feel the world as well as humans, Tacta developed the world’s most advanced tactile sensor. Smaller than a grain of sand, each sensor recognizes the full dynamic range of human touch from 250 pascals to 700,000 pascals. Each sensor is sensitive to both the barely-there weight of a settling feather and the driving force of an industrial clamp. The sensor samples 400 times a second, fine enough to read the texture of human skin, and resolves temperature within a tenth of a degree.

The Tacta Glove & Skill Capture System

That same sensor lives in the Tacta Glove, the key to the company’s groundbreaking Skill Capture system. In contrast to language-based AI models, today’s AI models for robotics are severely limited by a lack of relevant real-world data. Traditional approaches to data collection, such as teleoperation and human-operated grippers, are unscalable, impractical, expensive, and collect incomplete datasets.

Tacta’s Skill Capture system instead relies on the Tacta Glove, which can be deployed immediately, without training, and worn naturally by workers as they complete complex tasks. The Tacta Glove and Skill Capture system record force, motion, video, and temperature data directly from workers on the factory floor, producing the most complete record of human skill. Every hour of work performed with the Tacta Glove further compounds Tacta’s Skill Capture dataset.

Building Dexterous Intelligence

The Tacta Glove and Skill Capture system work together to train the company’s Dexterous Intelligence AI model, which enables the Tacta Hand to perform tasks with an unprecedented level of precision and adaptability.

Tacta’s Dexterous Intelligence system is first pretrained with a diverse set of tactile skills collected by the company’s Skill Capture system. Utilizing that same Skill Capture system to gather task-specific data at customer factories, Tacta then fine-tunes its AI models to perform more complex operations and adapt to new, long-tail situations. This approach significantly reduces the training time required to learn new skills and dramatically increases the success rate for automating high-value tasks.

The TactaBot Unlocks Robotics For High-Value Manufacturing

The TactaBot combines the Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and Dexterous Intelligence system into one product that is finally able to take on the high-value, labor-intensive tasks that automation has never been able to perform. Those tasks include building precision electronics, seating connector cables, and assembling wire harnesses. Automating these tasks is vital to bringing advanced manufacturing back to the United States, especially at a time when the domestic workforce for this kind of skilled labor is shrinking.

TactaBot is scheduled to ship in early 2027 for deployment with initial customers across the electronics, AI infrastructure, and automotive manufacturing industries. Over time, Tacta plans to extend the same platform to higher-precision domains, including medical devices, aerospace, and defense.

A World-Class Team With Decades of Experience

Tacta was founded by a proven, multidisciplinary team with decades of experience in advanced manufacturing and robotics. Across the organization, Tacta team members have successfully developed, commercialized and scaled world-leading products in the precision manufacturing, sensing, and robotics industries. Between them, co-founders Andreas Bibl (Executive Chairman) and Vikram Pavate (CEO) have sold companies to Apple, Fujifilm, and Lockheed Martin.

Touch Unlocks A Trillion-Dollar Market in Robotics

“Everyone is talking about a trillion-dollar market for robots, but the technology isn’t there yet, because robots still can’t use their hands,” said Vikram Pavate, co-founder and CEO of Tacta Systems. “The hand is the hardest problem in robotics, and it can’t be solved without touch. We built the entire stack, the hands, the sensing, and the intelligence, so robots can finally do the physical work our economy depends on, and so we can start bringing that work home.”

“Nearly every major technology trend of the next decade will be built on hard tech, and dexterous manipulation is one of the hardest and most valuable problems in the space,” said Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner of Matter Venture Partners. “This is a team that has built and scaled category-defining hardware before, more than once. They are among the very few in the world capable of solving this, and they have clearly built the best robotic hands in the world.”

“Replicating the dexterity, sensitivity, and resilience of the human hand is the challenge that has long defined robotic manipulation. Tacta is unlocking this breakthrough by developing a full-stack solution enabling robots to perform complex, dexterous tasks that only human hands have been capable of. We’re excited to work alongside Tacta as they pioneer the future of robotic manipulation and enable new capabilities in industrial automation,” said Will Fung, Principal, Woven Capital.

About Tacta Systems

Tacta Systems™ is pioneering Dexterous Intelligence for robotics. Tacta’s first product, the TactaBot™, combines the Tacta Hand—the world’s most advanced robotic hand for manufacturing—along with the Tacta Glove Skill Capture system and a proprietary Dexterous Intelligence AI engine to bring human-level touch to robotics for the first time. The end result is technology that empowers robots to sense, adapt, and manipulate the physical world with human-like precision and speed. Based in Palo Alto, California, and founded by serial entrepreneurs who previously sold companies to Apple, Fujifilm, and Lockheed Martin, Tacta has raised $75 million from investors including Matter Venture Partners, America’s Frontier Fund, SoftBank, Woven Capital, B Capital, Yazaki Innovations Inc., EDBI, Sojitz Corporation, CDIB-TEN Capital, B5 Capital, and Tyche Partners. For more information, visit tactasystems.com.

Media Contact:
Haymaker Group
Tacta@haymaker.co

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SOURCE Tacta Systems

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Miami Startup BOB Raises $5.5M To Build An AI-Powered Banking Platform

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The Miami-based company is building the most useful small business finance agent and banking platform in the world, with participation from Codie Sanchez, Mark Pincus,  and others.

MIAMI, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — BOB AI Holdings Corp. (“BOB”), the AI finance employee for small business, today announced it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Mischief (founder of Plaid, Zak Perret), with funding from Peter Thiel and participation from Codie Sanchez, Mark Pincus, Karman Ventures, and a group of additional investors and operators. BOB will use the capital to expand its product, grow its team in Miami, and bring a free AI finance agent to more of the small business owners who keep the American economy running.

The seed round brings together investors who share a conviction that small businesses deserve the same caliber finance department g that large companies take for granted. Mischief led the round, and Peter Thiel joined as a backer alongside Codie Sanchez, the investor and operator known for championing Main Street business ownership.

The funding follows BOB’s private beta launch in September 2026 and will support three priorities: deepening the product’s financial capabilities, scaling customer onboarding, and growing BOB’s team in Miami.

BOB is an AI finance employee that works alongside small business owners to handle the annoying but necessary financial work that usually eats their nights and weekends. Owners talk to BOB the way they would talk to a trusted bookkeeper or CFO, over WhatsApp, text message, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or the BOB app. BOB keeps the books, sends invoices, accepts payments, holds funds in a deposit account, and helps owners see where their cash is headed so they can make decisions with confidence.

BOB’s long-term goal is to be the most useful banking product in the world, and a banking product specifically built for this new world of AI agents, robots, and drones. But they are getting started by building the most useful and safe financial agent for small business owners. And instead of handing owners another dashboard to learn, BOB just does the work for them and communicates in plain language.

BOB’s wedge has been particularly effective because the company is laser-focused on small business owners who have largely been underserved by the wave of financial technology built over the last five to ten years. Many of those products were designed for the general market or for enterprise finance teams, and they assume the owner has time, training, or staff to run them. BOB starts from the opposite assumption. The owner of a roofing company, a restaurant, or a local services firm should be able to get real financial help without hiring a department to get it.

“Small business owners have been an afterthought for most of the financial technology built over the last decade,” said Adam Wininger, CEO of BOB. “They are running the business, doing the work, and then staying up late trying to make sense of their books. We built BOB to take that work off their plate entirely. Our goal is simple: to be the most useful banking platform in the world, and this funding lets us put our free CFO agent, BOB, in the hands of many more owners.”

“We invest in infrastructure that becomes indispensable, and a financial layer for autonomous agents is one of the clearest examples we’ve seen,” said Dustin Moring, General Partner at Mischief. “BOB is attacking an immense market at the exact moment AI is moving from advising on transactions to executing them. We’re proud to lead this round and back Adam and the team as they build the foundation agent banking will run on.”

About BOB

BOB AI Holdings Corp. is a Miami-based company building BOB, the AI finance employee and banking platform for small business. BOB handles bookkeeping, invoicing, payments, and cash flow for small business owners through the channels they already use, including WhatsApp, text message, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. BOB’s mission is to build the world’s most useful banking product in the world. Learn more at joinbob.ai. Disclaimer: BOB AI Holdings Corp is a financial technology company, not a bank.

Media contact

Joel Strauss – joel@strausscomms.com 

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SOURCE BOB AI Holdings Corp

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Union Home Mortgage unveils AI and automation advancements during 2026 Annual Partner Celebration

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The mortgage lender continues to make major technology investments going into 2027

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Union Home Mortgage (UHM), a high-growth independent mortgage banking company with a world-class culture, recently unveiled an array of AI and automation-driven technological achievements during the company’s 2026 Annual Partner Celebration held Oct. 16-17 in Cleveland, Ohio. This world-class event brought over 850 UHM employees, known internally as Partners, together to highlight the lender’s year-to-date business results, set goals to multiply business success, and foster connection between colleagues. Most notably, technology took center stage, highlighting advancements made in 2026 and a sneak peek at what is coming next.

Attendees were given an inside look at the next phase of technology shaping the business, with demonstrations of both newly implemented tools and future-focused prototypes. These innovations, ranging from conversational voice agents for enhanced customer support to the elimination of tedious manual document review, showcased the transformative potential of technology and underscored the lender’s ongoing investment in smarter, more efficient workflows.

“What makes this event so meaningful is the chance to celebrate our Partners and the impact they have on our business and culture,” said Bill Cosgrove, CEO of Union Home Mortgage. “By creating opportunities for open dialogue and idea-sharing, we’re able to strengthen our culture and identify new ways to move our business forward. As we look ahead to 2027, we remain focused on our 3X initiative, empowering our Partners with the resources, technology, and support they need to achieve more while continuing to deliver a world-class experience for our borrowers. Technology will be the key to UHM’s future, and I can’t wait to see what new solutions are developed in time for our next Annual Partner Celebration.”

While this year’s Annual Partner Celebration was heavily focused on technology, the event also featured senior leadership across all departments and business channels taking the stage to share updates on critical areas such as sales performance, servicing, benefits, employee recognition, and more. UHM Partners also took part in a panel discussion and Q&A with CEO Bill Cosgrove and Sr. Vice President of Business Development Al Blank. In addition to those attending in-person, the rest of the mortgage lender’s 2,300 Partners streamed the event virtually across the country. Following the event, attendees were invited to attend a celebratory carnival featuring casino-style games, a golf simulator, Family Feud, a custom t-shirt press, and more – earning raffle tickets to win high-value prizes. The lender also raffled off tickets to the MLB American League Championship Series being played at Progressive Field, as Union Home Mortgage is the Official Mortgage Partner of both teams that played in the series – the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cleveland Guardians.

Throughout the week, Partners also attended individualized leadership summits specific to their department or role within the company, as well as a Hard Stops Summit aimed at examining existing hard stops in the loan process to streamline operational efficiency.

Internal loan officer coaching program Partners Coaching Partners (PCP), which pairs each participating loan officer with a high-performing mentor and an accountability partner at their production level, also held their Fall PCP Impact event on October 14-15. The group aims to equip members with the skills and knowledge to increase productivity, generate leads, finetune the origination process, improve teambuilding, and increase profit margins. Next year, the PCP program will celebrate its twentieth consecutive PCP Impact event, cementing its status as a pillar of Partner development at UHM.

About Union Home Mortgage
Union Home Mortgage Corp. (UHM) is a high-growth, full-service retail, wholesale, and consumer direct independent mortgage banking company with branches across the U.S. in 49 states + D.C. UHM is an in-house loan servicer offering world-class customer service through high touch communication & technology. A privately held family business, with a collaborative culture that stands out in the mortgage industry, UHM Partners (employees) are guided by a Code of Conduct that emphasizes respect, open communication, and accountability. All these principles translate to industry-leading customer retention and satisfaction. Some honors include being a Six-Year USA TODAY Top Workplace and a Twelve-Year Northeast Ohio Top Workplace. Learn more at www.uhm.com.

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SOURCE Union Home Mortgage

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Pew Funds 4 Biomedical Research Partnerships in Latin America

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Scientists will team up on interdisciplinary explorations

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Pew Charitable Trusts announced today that four pairs of researchers from Latin America will receive funding to pursue collaborative biomedical research projects.

These eight esteemed scientists, all independent investigators in Latin America, will team up on interdisciplinary explorations that span plant biology, genetics, immunology, and more. Recipients will receive a combined $180,000 per pair—$90,000 annually over two years.

The Partnership Award was created to help advance scientific collaboration and networking among the biomedical research community in Latin America. Recipients include four alumni of Pew’s Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences, which has funded nearly 350 scientists from across the region since 1991. The Partnership awards were made possible by a grant from Biohub.

“Pew is proud to support these exceptional scientists from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,” said Donna Frisby-Greenwood, Pew’s senior vice president for Philadelphia and scientific advancement. “Their creative ideas and pioneering approaches will undoubtedly lead to important discoveries that advance biomedical research across Latin America and the world.”

Recipients of this year’s Partnership Award are:

Luis F. Larrondo, Ph.D., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2004 Pew Latin American Fellow

Gerardo Cárcamo-Oyarce, Ph.D., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Larrondo and Cárcamo-Oyarce will establish a new, light-based platform for studying the formation of biofilms by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Priscilla Olsen, Ph.D., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), 2016 Pew Latin American Fellow

Beatriz Patricio, Ph.D., Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)

Olsen and Patricio will develop and test a new strategy to overcome antimicrobial drug resistance.

Paulo José P. L. Teixeira, Ph.D., Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, 2013 Pew Latin American Fellow

Antonio Camargo, Ph.D., Universidade de São Paulo

Teixeira and Camargo will examine plant immune receptor specificity.

Marcelo Yanovsky, Ph.D., Fundación Instituto Leloir – CONICET, 2000 Pew Latin American Fellow

Esteban Beckwith, Ph.D., Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires – CONICET – Partner Institute of the Max Plank Society

Yanovsky and Beckwith will study how organisms regulate gene expression in response to environmental stress.

Founded in 1948, The Pew Charitable Trusts uses data to make a difference. Pew addresses the challenges of a changing world by illuminating issues, creating common ground, and advancing ambitious projects that lead to tangible progress. Learn more at pew.org.

Press contact: Liz Lowe, 215-575-4812, elowe@pewtrusts.org

https://www.pew.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-and-statements/2026/10/22/pew-funds-4-biomedical-research-partnerships-in-latin-america

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SOURCE The Pew Charitable Trusts

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