Touchlab is a small Edinburgh company attempting something quite specific: giving remotely operated robots a working sense of touch. Founded by chief executive Dr Zaki Hussein, it started out at the Higgs Centre for Innovation in Edinburgh and is now based at the National Robotarium, the UK's £22.4m robotics and artificial intelligence facility. A profile published around its appearance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed's 2026 Future Lab put the team at 17 engineers and PhDs, seven years into developing the technology.
Its only disclosed venture round remains a $4.8m seed in February 2022, led by Octopus Ventures with participation from Creator Fund and Techstart Ventures. Even at that early stage the company counted Sellafield Ltd as a nuclear-sector client — unusual for a firm of its age. In November 2021 it was named one of 15 finalists in the $10m ANA Avatar XPRIZE, a competition for telepresence robot systems that combine vision, sound and touch.
The core product is an electronic skin: thin, flexible pressure-sensing arrays that can be wrapped around robotic hands, grippers and arms, whether rigid or soft. The company says its sensing elements go down to around 50 microns, roughly the width of a human hair, and capture pressure in three dimensions, allowing a robot to adjust its grip dynamically rather than follow pre-programmed motions. On the operator's side, a haptic glove reproduces what the robot is touching; Touchlab has demonstrated teleoperation between Edinburgh and Miami, a distance of 6,684km. Those specifications are company-supplied. What is independently documented is where the kit has been trialled.
Its Välkky telerobot completed a six-month clinical pilot on a stroke ward at Laakso Hospital in Helsinki, performing tasks such as measuring vitals and serving meals. In the nuclear domain, the TEL-ND project — funded through the Defence and Security Accelerator with support from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, worth £550,000 across two paired contracts, produced a demonstrator built on a PAL Robotics TiagoOmni base with a Schunk SVH robotic hand covered in Touchlab's skin, radiation-tolerant cameras from i3D Robotics and teleoperation software from BOW, with the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre involved.
The UK's nuclear decommissioning programme is the clearest route to relevance. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has set targets for remote glovebox decommissioning and for halving the human hours spent on high-hazard activities by 2030 — work that consists largely of manual, tactile tasks now done by suited operators. Touchlab's client relationship with Sellafield Ltd dates back to at least 2022, and its TEL-ND demonstrator was aimed squarely at glovebox work.
The wider direction of travel at Sellafield supports the thesis: in February 2026 the site completed its first teleoperated contamination-swabbing trial, using a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped with a haptic controller from Haply Robotics under the RAICo collaboration. That trial did not involve Touchlab, but it shows haptic, touch-mediated remote operation moving from research into Sellafield practice, and therefore a live domestic market for exactly what Touchlab sells. The National Robotarium base also puts the firm inside the UK's main publicly backed robotics cluster.
The claim to relevance is already evidenced by paying nuclear-sector work; the open question is scale. The confirming signal would be Touchlab's skin or haptics appearing in a standing deployment on an active UK nuclear facility, rather than in grant-funded demonstrators — or a named role in a RAICo programme. Fresh funding would be another: nothing has been disclosed since the 2022 seed, and a four-year-old seed round is a long runway for hardware development.
Published results from the Helsinki hospital pilot would strengthen the case elsewhere. The risks are equally concrete: vision-based manipulation systems are improving quickly and may erode the case for dedicated tactile hardware, and Sellafield's first swab trial shows that others, Haply among them, can supply the haptic layer. A 17-person company selling into the world's most conservative procurement environments will need patience, and capital.
Sources: startupsmagazine.co.uk · goodwood.com · machinery.co.uk · uktech.news · raico.org
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