Julian Olschwang is the Founder and CEO of Hemlock, a Y Combinator-backed hardware company building a force-sensing wristband to generate contact-rich training data for robotic AI.

Julian studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and previously interned at the UCLA Biomechatronics Laboratory, where he built generative adversarial networks (GANs) for military robotic data generation.

Julian is a multi-award recipient, recognized with the Davidson Fellows Scholarship, the Lemelson Award for Invention, the Lockheed Martin STEM Scholarship, and an ONR Naval Science Award, among others.

Hemlock is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch and has raised a $3.2M seed round from investors including Y Combinator and ACQ Ventures (Alex Hormozi's fund), validating the company's approach to solving a critical bottleneck in robotics training data.

Hemlock's Bracelet wristband reads surface EMG signals from forearm muscles to capture force and intent during human demonstrations, addressing a fundamental gap in embodied AI training that video and pose data alone cannot solve.