Ant Group Leads 100 Million Yuan Series A in Electronic Skin Startup Juqiao Industrial

Ant Group has led a 100 million yuan Series A round in Juqiao Industrial, a Chinese startup that weaves sensors directly into fabric, Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence reported. Existing shareholders Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong and Qingdao Hexin also joined the round. Inve Capital served as long-term exclusive financial advisor. Juqiao will spend the capital scaling production and delivery of its fabric-based electronic skin, advancing tactile and multimodal technology, and expanding into robotics, home furnishings and healthcare.

The company's commercial record gives the deal substance. Juqiao says it has served more than 400 clients, over 200 of them in the embodied intelligence sector. It has delivered nearly 10,000 tactile gloves to date.

Why does touch matter for robots?

The startup, founded in November 2023 in Weihai, Shandong, attacks a specific gap. When a human hand holds a paper cup, fingers adjust grip as the wall deforms. Inserting a part into a hole, the hand corrects course on subtle resistance. Robots lack that intuitive feedback and fail in familiar ways — crushing eggs or dropping objects entirely.

Juqiao's gloves restore that channel. A human wears the gloves, performs tasks, and the system records contact areas, force shifts and movement details alongside first-person video. The once-abstract "feel" becomes data models can train on. That multimodal data now feeds model research worldwide, driving large-scale training that fuses touch with vision.

The barrier is engineering, not demand. A glove must allow natural movement, capture rich detail and endure repeated use — three competing constraints the industry calls the "impossible triangle."

How does fabric become a sensor?

Juqiao's answer lies in materials and structure. It assigns conductivity, pressure resistance and load-bearing roles to separate fibers, then weaves them into a sensing network. Contact triggers local deformation, shifting conductive pathways; circuits read those shifts and convert them into tactile data through calibration and algorithms.

Put simply, the sensor is no longer a layer sandwiched inside film — it is the fabric itself.

The specifications are concrete. The full-palm glove carries hundreds of sensing points per hand, with minimum spacing of 2 millimeters. It detects forces as low as 0.01 newtons and works with motion capture and teleoperation. The latest "Skin 2.0" adds detection of force direction, shear force and slip tendency. Multi-layer sensors run under 0.8 millimeters thick; single-layer flexible products can be thinner than 0.3 millimeters. The system maps raw readings into mechanical values with ±5% consistency, moving tactile sensing from binary signals to quantifiable data.

Can the company manufacture at scale?

Juqiao built its own production line in Weihai, retrofitting spinning, dyeing and weaving equipment. After thousands of trials, the yield rate now exceeds 95%. Rapid prototyping takes less than a day. The company is also developing a data acquisition system that fuses touch with first-person vision, supported by SDKs, visualization software and training tools.

The fabric-first approach opens product lines beyond gloves. Juqiao has introduced robotic arm skin and is expanding to torso and sole coverage, so robots sense full-body contact during handling and collaboration. It is embedding sensors into everyday goods as well:

• partnering with mattress and sleep-tech firms to monitor movement, posture and breathing;
• working with ergonomic chair brands on comfort and support;
• collaborating with automakers on occupant monitoring, adaptive seating and pressure detection.

What is the real test ahead?

The electronic skin sector is heating up, and Gasgoo flags the risk of homogeneity as competitors pile in. Ant Group's 100 million yuan clears Juqiao's capacity and delivery hurdle. The harder question, as Gasgoo puts it, is turning "a piece of sensing cloth" into replicable, profitable products at scale — and that test begins now, in a market where the fabric itself, not the funding, will decide who survives.