Zurich startup Enact raises $30M to give robots a sense of touch

Zurich-based Enact Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $30M pre-seed round from redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital. It builds robots that sense force and touch through their motors, not only cameras. Founder Manuel Yves Galliker previously led software for 1X’s NEO humanoid.

Enact Intelligence, a Zurich startup building robots that can feel force and touch, has come out of stealth with $30M in pre-seed funding, the company said on Thursday. Venture firms redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital backed the round.

Angel investors include Mistral founder Arthur Mensch and Yann LeCun, whose own AI lab, AMI Labs, raised about $1B in March. Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics, also invested.

Sifted reported it is the largest pre-seed round ever raised in Switzerland. It is about four times the $7.2M that Budapest’s Allonic raised in February to rebuild robot bodies, which its investors called a Hungarian record.

Most robots today rely mainly on cameras to understand the world, Enact says. That makes it hard for them to handle objects, work reliably and learn from experience.

Touch sensors can help, but they tend to be too costly and fragile for factory work, the company adds. The UK’s ARIA research agency is spending £52M on robot dexterity projects, including electronic skin, because robot hardware has lagged behind software.

Enact measures force inside a robot’s motors instead of with separate sensors. It compares this to the way people feel tension in their muscles, not only at their fingertips. The company says the approach works for anything from a simple robot arm to a full humanoid.

“We can build on top of existing models, like video models, and adapt them to output robot actions for interacting with the real world,” said Manuel Yves Galliker, Enact’s founder.

Galliker founded Enact in March. He previously led software for the NEO humanoid at 1X, whose new hands can sense touch, and then worked at robotics lab Physical Intelligence. Enact’s 12-person team includes engineers from DeepMind, Amazon Robotics and defence firm Helsing.

He chose Zurich over the Bay Area on purpose. “Silicon Valley has traditionally been very strong in software and AI, but it’s lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent,” he said. Zurich is also home to Gravis Robotics, which raised $200M in August for software that lets diggers work on their own.

Enact plans to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027 and speed up its hardware work. It is in talks with large European companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing to put its first robots to work.