Jianxiang 'Jack' Xu is Co-Founder and Software Engineer at Proception (YC W25), a Palo Alto-based humanoid robotics company building the world's most dexterous robotic hands for research and industrial applications.

Jack holds a BASc in Mechatronics and an MASc in Mechatronics, Robotics, and AI Engineering from the University of Waterloo, where he also led the Robotics Design Team's Autonomous Racing Robot.

Jack published his thesis-based MASc research on tightly-coupled dual-VIO for mobile manipulation in IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics, presented at AIM 2024, demonstrating a rare blend of academic rigor and hands-on engineering.

Before co-founding Proception, Jack engineered embedded software, sensing and actuation, and real-time ultrasonic localization at Tesla, contributing directly to the Optimus humanoid robot program, and earlier built medical exoskeletons at Trexo Robotics (YC W19).

Proception shipped its first functional ProHand prototype in just four months, secured $500K in Seed funding backed by Y Combinator, and is on a roadmap to deploy fully autonomous humanoid robots across healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics by 2028.