ManoMotion, 7 Years After an EIC Accelerator Hand Tracking Grant

Getting a phone camera to understand a moving hand, all 27 degrees of freedom of it, without a depth sensor and without draining the battery, was the problem ManoMotion set out to solve. The Stockholm company grew out of research by Shahrouz Yousefi and Professor Haibo Li at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and in 2017 it told KTH that its software could track "many of the 27 degrees of freedom" of a human hand with a smartphone's ordinary camera. Seven years after an EU grant to turn that into a product for augmented reality, the hand tracking ships in a German table saw that drops its blade when a hand comes too close, and ManoMotion's website leads with "Physical AI" for industrial safety.

The European Commission selected ManoMotion's project RealHands at the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the grant-only programme of the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot that became the EIC Accelerator. The Commission's list of selected companies names ManoMotion AB of Stockholm as the only company on the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,174,593.75 towards a total cost of €3,106,562.50, for a project that ran from 1 June 2019 to 31 May 2021.

What ManoMotion Does Now

ManoMotion is an active company. The Swedish register data shown by Syna and Ratsit list it as an active limited company with filed accounts for 2025, seven employees, a board of three chaired by Urban Forssell, and Shahrouz Yousefi as external managing director. Ratsit also lists Yousefi as a beneficial owner with 25 to 50% control. When Yousefi, who described himself as founder and chief technology officer on a 2024 matchmaking profile, took over as chief executive is not public.

The company's website now sells three things: "AI Industrial Safety", gesture control for devices, robots and the Internet of Things, and hand tracking for augmented and virtual reality headsets. Its safety product, SaferHands, uses one RGB camera and an NVIDIA Jetson board to watch hands near saws, drills, mills, lathes, presses and roller mills, and signals the machine to stop. The page states plainly that SaferHands "is not safety-certified as a standalone solution"; certification applies to specific machine integrations.

The most recent customer evidence is a case study published on 19 January 2026, in which an unnamed tire manufacturer extended SaferHands to 20 more machines after a pilot on roller mills with no accidents. The customer, the country and the contract value are not given, and no third party has confirmed the deployment.

The Technology: A Hand Model From a Plain Camera

Most hand tracking in headsets relies on depth sensors, infrared cameras or several cameras, and on powerful processors. ManoMotion's approach, described in its US patent US10108270B2, matches what one 2D camera sees against a very large database of annotated hand gestures, searching for the closest entry rather than reconstructing the hand from scratch, which keeps the computing load low enough for a phone. The RealHands objective on CORDIS describes "real-time 3D gestural analysis with the simple RGB camera found in everyday smartphones, with minimal computing power and minimal battery consumption".

The same property, cheap hardware and fast response, is what ManoMotion now sells to machine builders. Ahead of NVIDIA GTC 2025, the company claimed a latency below 10 milliseconds; in January 2024 it had claimed 15 milliseconds. Neither figure has been independently tested in any public source found for this article.

What RealHands Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project's final periodic report, covering June 2020 to May 2021, lists four objectives: expand product features and quality, expand into new markets with a focus on the USA and Asia, co-develop features with industry partners, and ramp up marketing. It reports that ManoMotion merged its SDKs into one framework, extended gesture support to full hand tracking, filed patent applications, and opened a US operation in 2020 and an Asian operation in the second quarter of 2020. The standard SDK, launched in January 2020, was downloaded 1,600 times in its free version within six months, with 200 requests for the commercial version, and the report counts 10,338 registered SDK users.

It names no partners, only their types: an industrial company using the hand detection in safety systems, a US and a Finnish headset maker, and a carmaker that licensed the SDK to test touchless controls. Two of these can be matched to public announcements. In September 2021 ManoMotion said German saw maker Altendorf had built its hand tracking into the Hand Guard system for sliding table saws, which had received concept-level certification from Germany's IFA; a month later it repeated the claim and named ThirdEye's X2 mixed reality glasses as a user in its 33-listan release. The carmaker has never been named.

1. Unified SDK with full hand trackingDeliveredLaunched January 2020; SDK still updated on the Unity Asset Store in February 2025.
2. Industrial partner for safety useDeliveredAltendorf Hand Guard, certified at concept level in 2021, per ManoMotion.
3. Headset makers as partnersDeliveredThirdEye named in 2021; NuEyes announced its partnership in March 2022.
4. US and Asian operationsNot verifiedReported opened in 2020; the website now lists only the Stockholm office.
5. Project on timeDeliveredClosed on its planned end date, 31 May 2021.

Against its own objectives, RealHands was delivered: the software exists, partners used it, and the project closed on schedule. What the report could not show is a market. A free SDK with 1,600 downloads in six months is a developer audience, not a business, and the consumer augmented reality market on phones that RealHands was built for did not take off in the years that followed.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The company changed its leadership as the grant arrived. On 19 March 2019, two months after the cut-off, Lars Österberg replaced founder Daniel Carlman as chief executive, according to a company release. In June 2020 ManoMotion raised SEK 8.2 million from existing and new angel investors and partners and received the second payment of what it called a "23 MSEK" EU grant, which it said financed the company through 2020, according to its press release and a second company document. Earlier money came from a seed round of $1.7 million in August 2016, reported by ArcticStartup and listed by CB Insights. No funding round after June 2020 has been announced.

The product line then moved towards industry. In November 2023 ManoMotion introduced SaferHands as a separate safety product line, and in 2024 an activity tracker for indoor spaces. Altendorf still sells the Hand Guard, which it calls the "world's first and only certified AI- and camera-based safety assistance system for sliding table saws", and since August 2025 has fitted a new generation of it as standard. Altendorf's release of April 2026 does not name its software supplier, so whether the new generation still runs ManoMotion's tracking could not be verified.

The Money

The filed accounts show a small company that has lost money every year. Ratsit's summary of the accounts filed with Bolagsverket gives a net loss between SEK 6.2 million and SEK 8.9 million in each year from 2021 to 2025, and a headcount that fell from 13 to 7. Syna, a second register service, confirms the 2025 loss of SEK 6,173,000 and the seven employees.

The two services disagree on sales. Syna gives 2025 revenue of SEK 2,593,000, down 1.2% on 2024; Ratsit gives SEK 5.4 million, up 5.6%, and SEK 12.4 million for 2021. Which figure is the company's net sales could not be settled without the filed annual report, which was not read for this article.

The balance sheet has nonetheless been repaired. Ratsit's equity ratio for the company moved from minus 157.7% in 2021 to 8% in 2022 and 78.6% in 2025, with equity of SEK 10.2 million and share capital of SEK 11.7 million at the end of 2025. That points to fresh capital or converted debt since 2021, but no share issue or round has been announced, and who provided the money is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU is rewriting the rules ManoMotion's new market depends on. The new Machinery Regulation, (EU) 2023/1230, applies from 20 January 2027 and for the first time covers safety functions carried out by AI modules that use learning techniques, with third-party conformity assessment for high-risk machinery, according to the EU-OSHA summary of the regulation. ManoMotion's safety page says SaferHands was developed in response to it. A European supplier of certifiable AI safety software for machines fits that framework, and the Altendorf certification gives ManoMotion an early reference.

The original bet fits European digital policy less neatly. RealHands was a play on mobile augmented reality, a market led by Apple, Google and Meta, whose own hand tracking runs on hardware they control. ManoMotion's move from phones to factory floors looks like a search for a niche where a small European software company does not compete with the platform owners.

The Verdict

ManoMotion has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.