By Tony Low · AI in APAC · 22 September 2026

One of the harder problems in physical AI isn’t teaching a robot to see or to plan — it’s teaching it to feel. Singapore-and-California-based startup TacnIQ.ai is tackling exactly that, and just picked up fresh backing to do it.

TacnIQ.ai has closed $1.5M in lead funding from In Group Holdings, part of a $3M pre-seed round, to keep building what it calls tactile-AI foundation models: machine learning systems trained to interpret touch and physical contact, drawn from one of the largest tactile datasets around — more than 5,000 hours of interaction data. The idea is to give robots and wearable sensor nodes a genuine sense of touch, useful for judging grip, pressure and contact in ways cameras alone can’t.

The target sectors are refreshingly concrete: logistics, construction, e-commerce fulfilment, hospitality and healthcare — places where getting a delicate grip right, or catching an unsafe motion early, has real commercial and safety payoff. CEO Aashish Mehta says the new capital goes straight into engineering headcount and pushing the tech from lab datasets toward practical deployment.

It’s a small round in dollar terms, but it’s a useful marker of where Singapore’s AI ecosystem is putting its money: not just large language models, but the foundational sensor-and-data-layer work that physical AI and robotics actually depend on. As logistics operators and manufacturers across the region look for ways to deploy robots safely alongside people, tactile perception is quietly becoming one of the pieces they’ll need.

Source: Singapore’s TacnIQ.ai raises $1.5M from In Group Holdings in pre-seed round — Technode Global, 22 September 2026

---

Tony Low covers the technical and functional side of AI adoption across APAC for AIAPAC.ai Insights.