Inside Gleechi's EIC Accelerator Project on VR Hand Grasping

Picking up a cup is trivial for a person and hard for a computer. Gleechi, a Stockholm company founded in 2014 by two robotics researchers from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and an entrepreneur, built software called VirtualGrasp that works out how a hand should hold any virtual object and animates the grip in real time. The European Union funded it twice. A €2.04 million SME Instrument grant from 2018 paid to turn VirtualGrasp into a product for virtual reality, and in the EIC Accelerator pilot's January 2020 cut-off Gleechi was selected with blended finance: a further grant to bring the same grasping technology to industrial robots, and equity to commercialise it, according to CORDIS and the European Commission's list of selected companies.

The grant was €490,084, towards a €700,120 project that ran from 1 July 2020 to 31 December 2021. In April 2021 the EIC Fund announced an investment of SEK 25 million, reported by Auganix and Silicon Canals. Two years later, on 28 August 2023, the Stockholm District Court declared Gleechi AB bankrupt, according to the receiver, the law firm Schjødt.

Bankruptcy, Then a New Company With the Same Name

Gleechi AB is still in bankruptcy. The company registers Ratsit and Syna both list it as bankrupt, with bankruptcy opened on 28 August 2023, and Ratsit shows it deregistered for F-tax and no longer active in the VAT register. When Schjødt announced the bankruptcy on 11 September 2023 it said the estate would keep the business running during a tender process. Who bought the business, if anyone, has not been published. The bankruptcy notices in Post- och Inrikes Tidningar sit behind a CAPTCHA and could not be checked for this article.

Seventeen days after the bankruptcy, on 14 September 2023, a new company was formed: Gleechi Technology AB, with Jakob Way, Kai Hübner and Dan Song on its board, the same three people who sat on the board of the bankrupt company, according to Ratsit. It runs the gleechi.com website, which describes Gleechi Technology AB as "founded in 2014"; the register says it was formed in 2023. The new company also took Gleechi AB's place in an EU project: CORDIS lists Gleechi AB's participation in the Horizon Europe project Fluently as ended, with €83,550.25 of EU funding, and Gleechi Technology AB as a partner with €278,043.50.

The successor is small. Its 2025 accounts show operating income of SEK 1.8 million, net sales of SEK 1.2 million, a profit of SEK 0.1 million and two employees, according to Ratsit; Syna gives SEK 1,823 thousand of turnover, a result of SEK 133 thousand and two employees for the same year. Gleechi AB had 21 staff in its last filed year.

The Technology: Grasps Computed, Not Animated

In a VR game or training simulation, a hand that holds an object has to look right: fingers wrapped around the handle, not sunk into it. The usual approach, CORDIS notes, is to define in advance how each object may be grasped and animate those grasps by hand, which takes time and limits users to the grips someone thought of. VirtualGrasp instead analyses the shape and physical properties of a virtual object with machine learning and predictive algorithms, picks a realistic grip and snaps the hand to it, according to the 2018 project's objective. It grew out of more than eight years of grasping research for robots at KTH.

That origin explains the 2020 project. A robot that has to pick up hundreds of different objects faces the same problem as a virtual hand: someone has to program every grasp. The EIC Accelerator pilot project set out to turn VirtualGrasp into a grasp planner for "any object with any gripper in any application", as the final report puts it, so that robots could be set up without expert programmers.

What the EIC Accelerator Pilot Project Promised

The 2020 proposal, summarised on CORDIS, asked for "€490,000 of grant to industrialize our solution for robotics & €5.4m of equity to commercialize across 4 segments", and set a target of "€90m+ in revenues and 200+ employees by 2025". The grant ran for 18 months and closed on schedule; its single periodic report, covering the whole project, was last updated on 29 April 2022.

The report describes a working proof of concept. Gleechi joined a project in the Swedish coating industry, where parts are hung on hooks before coating, and designed a "suction-pin" gripper with it. A camera system from Unibap identified objects near the robot; VirtualGrasp found holes and surfaces the gripper could use and scored each grasp. Any gripper described in the URDF robot description format was supported, and grasps could be reviewed in a visualisation tool or in a plugin for ABB's RobotStudio programming software. The report illustrates a tool called RoboGrasp Studio.

1. Grasp planning for industrial robotsDeliveredProof of concept in a Swedish coating application, per the CORDIS report.
2. Support for any gripper and robot software integrationDeliveredURDF gripper support and an ABB RobotStudio plugin, per the same report.
3. Industrialised robotics product on the marketNot achievedNo robotics product, licence or customer has been announced; gleechi.com sells only VR training.
4. Commercialise across 4 segments with €5.4M equityNot achievedSEK 25M was announced from the EIC Fund; only the VR training segment was commercialised.
5. €90M+ revenue and 200+ employees by 2025MissedNet sales of SEK 1.5M and 21 staff in 2022; bankrupt in 2023.

The robotics work is real and documented, which makes the award more than a paper exercise. But the aim of the project was to industrialise the grasp planner, and nothing after the report shows a robotics product reaching customers. By the time the project ended, Gleechi's commercial effort had moved to VR training.

What Gleechi Built Instead: VR Training

The 2018 grant, which ended in April 2021, tested VirtualGrasp in three markets: industrial training, stroke rehabilitation and VR games. Its final report says the company took the software "from an early proof of concept to a product ready to be sold", started selling VR training to "several multinational industrial clients", and paused stroke rehabilitation because healthcare partners put innovation on hold during COVID-19. A CORDIS Results in Brief article from May 2021 names SAAB Aeronautics as testing VirtualGrasp for assembly training and the training provider YrkesAkademin as using it for sterile-environment training for healthcare workers.

In December 2021 Gleechi released a training platform with no-code creation tools, sold as a monthly subscription per user, according to its press release. A 2022 profile by Techarenan named Saab and YrkesAkademin as clients. Today the website offers training programmes for automotive work, dental nursing, the military, overhead cranes, property maintenance and sterile technicians, and lists ABB, Siemens, SAAB, Teledyne FLIR, YrkesAkademin, Stadin AO, Alfa Laval and Billerud as clients. Apart from Saab and YrkesAkademin, these names could not be confirmed by a second source. The Dental VR Academy site quotes a YrkesAkademin teacher and still carries a "©2023 Gleechi AB" notice.

The Money

Gleechi AB's filed accounts, as reported by Ratsit, show a company that lived mostly on income other than sales. Net sales never exceeded SEK 1.5 million a year between 2018 and 2022. Other operating income, the largest item every year up to 2020, reached SEK 11.6 million in 2020. In 2021 and 2022 the company booked SEK 7.6 million and SEK 9.5 million of its own development work as an asset. The two registers present 2022 differently: Ratsit gives total operating income of SEK 12.5 million, including the capitalised work, while Syna gives turnover of SEK 2,917 thousand, which matches net sales plus other operating income in Ratsit's breakdown. Both report a 2022 loss of SEK 11.6 million.

The balance sheet changed in 2021. Share capital stayed at SEK 0.1 million, but a bond loan of SEK 24.2 million appeared, rising to SEK 36.8 million in 2022. Cash rose from SEK 2.4 million at the end of 2020 to SEK 11.1 million at the end of 2021. The public summaries do not say who holds the bond loan or whether it is the instrument behind the SEK 25 million EIC Fund investment announced in April 2021. Equity was minus SEK 16.2 million at the end of 2022, the last year Gleechi AB filed accounts.

Why Europe Should Care

VirtualGrasp sat where two EU priorities meet. Making robots easier to program is central to automation in European manufacturing, which is why Gleechi was a partner in Fluently, a Horizon Europe project with €9.18 million of EU funding, coordinated by Reply Deutschland, to make industrial robots collaborate with workers of any skill level, according to CORDIS. And in July 2023 the European Commission adopted a strategy on Web 4.0 and virtual worlds, which estimated the global virtual worlds market at €27 billion in 2022 and over €800 billion by 2030 and said that "there is no EU ecosystem" bringing the value chain together. A month later, Gleechi AB was bankrupt.

The Verdict

Gleechi, its founders and the bankruptcy receiver have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.