Touchlab raised a $4.8 million in seed funding led by Octopus Ventures.

Touchlab, an Edinburgh, Scotland (UK)-based startup developing electronic skin (e-skin) for robots, announced completing a seed funding round closed at $4.8 million.

The money was raised from investors led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including Creator Fund and Techstart Ventures.

The proceeds will be used to strengthen its commercial and tech teams.

Touchlab, founded in 2018 by Zaki Hussein, Laura Garcia Caberol and Vasilis Mitrakos, manufactures an e-skin system which can be wrapped around hard or soft robots to sense pressure, location, and direction in real-time. The e-skin also performs as a platform for Tele-operated Avatar technology, which Touchlab is currently developing in collaboration with Prof Vijayakumar and Dr Ivan from Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Dr Navaraj from Nottingham Trent University. This technology is enabled by the (traditionally missing) sense of touch and has been demonstrated over a distance of more than 600 kilometres. Although not advertised as such, it could easily become part of a future metaverse to enable telecommuting, especially in dangerous environments.

The Telerobot is also seeing traction in the medical sector, where Touchlab has scheduled a pilot with a Finnish hospital (to run later this year). When using the Telerobot, a proxy will be installed between a healthcare provider and patient, which is expected to reduce the transmission of healthcare-acquired infections (HAI’s).

Touchlab previously was pre-seeded by Techstart Ventures and Creator Fund in 2021.