Chestnut Robotics was founded in January 2025 in Silicon Valley, with one goal from day one: bringing robots out of the lab and into daily life. Our flagship product, Aero Hand Open, is a 16-DOF tendon-driven dexterous hand built to industrial standards — precise, strong, and durable enough for real world use. Paired with our UMI teleoperation pipeline, it captures natural human motion to train action models that generalize across tasks. Hardware and AI are co-designed from the ground up, not bolted together after the fact. Chestnut was founded by Evan Tao, who previously worked on Tesla Optimus and Apple Vision Pro, and Joe Dong, formerly of Waymo and XPeng. Aero Hand is already deployed across leading universities and research labs worldwide.