BrainCo, the Hangzhou-based company that became China’s first brain-computer interface unicorn, has released a dexterous robotic hand built on the same neural decoding and tactile sensing technology it developed for prosthetic limbs.
The Revo 3, announced April 13, packs 21 degrees of freedom, full-palm tactile sensing at 0.01 newtons of resolution, and fingertip visuotactile sensors that detect deformations as small as 130 micrometres. It runs at a 500-hertz control frequency, supports 33 grasp types, and exceeds the human hand’s range of motion on the Kapandji opposition test. Demo videos show the hand solving a Rubik’s cube, skipping rope, and cutting with scissors.
The Revo 3 is a step up from the Revo 2, which BrainCo launched at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July 2025 with 11 degrees of freedom and a 50-newton grip. The jump from 11 to 21 degrees of freedom in under a year reflects accelerating iteration in a market where several Chinese and international companies are racing to supply hands for humanoid robot platforms.
BrainCo was founded in 2015 by Harvard alumnus Han Bicheng and initially focused on non-invasive EEG-based brain-computer interfaces. Its DexHand021 prosthetic demonstrated real-time brain-controlled grasping in clinical trials, with users adjusting grip force through decoded neural signals. The Revo 3 carries forward that lineage: the same fine-grained tactile feedback that enabled intuitive prosthetic control now gives a robot hand the sensory resolution to handle fragile objects or adapt grip mid-task.
The company has said it plans to merge the dexterous robotic hand and the bionic prosthetic hand into a single platform. If that integration holds, it would create a pathway where a person wearing a BCI could control a humanoid robot’s hands with the same neural interface they use for a prosthetic limb. The technical gap between replacing a lost hand and operating a remote one narrows to a software problem.
BrainCo closed a CNY 2 billion (US$286 million) funding round in early 2026, co-led by IDG Capital and Walden International. That makes it the second-largest single BCI funding event globally, behind Neuralink’s US$650 million raise in mid-2025. The company holds more than 250 patents and has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing via CITIC Securities, with guidance completed in February 2026.
The broader pattern extends beyond one company. Several firms that started in BCI prosthetics or neural decoding are finding that the sensor arrays, signal processing pipelines, and fine motor control algorithms they built for human augmentation translate directly to robotics. BrainCo is the most visible example so far, but as humanoid robots move from factory floors to less structured environments, the dexterity problem — how to give a machine the hand control that humans take for granted — may end up being solved by the people who learned to decode it from the brain.