Kyber Labs Hand

No gears, no tendons: Kyber Labs, a Brooklyn start-up founded in 2022 by Tyler Habowski and Yonatan Robbins, drives its five-finger hand with artificial muscle fibres, electromagnetic linear actuators made of wire coils and magnet sliders arranged in antagonistic pairs at every joint. The founder puts the count at 20 degrees of freedom.

Because the motors are the joints themselves, the hand is fully backdrivable and offers torque transparency, which the company considers essential for AI-based control. Contact is sensed through the drive currents, while high-density fingertip sensors are still in development. Weight, payload, interfaces and even an official model name are not published.

Public demonstrations have run since November 2025, including handling blood samples in a lab, and the intended markets are lab automation and assembly. Kyber raised USD 1.7 million in pre-seed funding, plans no direct sales and aims for a volume price in the hundreds rather than thousands of dollars; price on request. A parallel artificial-muscle approach is Muscle V0.