Enact Intelligence, a Zurich-based physical artificial intelligence startup, has emerged from stealth mode and announced a US$30 million Pre-Seed round, equivalent to about €27 million. The investment was led by redalpine, Notion Capital, and firstminute capital, with participation from prominent angel investors including Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and Mistral founder Arthur Mensch. Enact aims to give robots a reliable sense of touch and force, addressing a weakness that camera-only systems have not solved.
A New Sensory Architecture for Robots
Most robots today depend almost entirely on cameras, which makes grasping and manipulation unreliable even with large training datasets. Tasks requiring delicate contact, such as plugging in a cable, fitting a seal, or starting a screw, remain manual work. Enact is redesigning the robot stack from AI models and data streams to actuators and sensors, creating a nervous system that senses force across the entire body and a cortex that turns those signals into bodily awareness and movement control.
Founding Team and Investor Backing
Manuel Yves Galliker, the chief executive, founded Enact in March after leading the team at 1X that taught its NEO robot to walk and later working at Physical Intelligence in the United States. The 12-person team includes former staff from Google DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, the defense AI company Helsing, and Physical Intelligence. Philip Kneis, formerly an investor at redalpine, has joined the company to lead growth.
Targeting High-Mix Assembly Tasks
The first applications target the final steps of assembly, where plugs are inserted, clips are snapped into place, and screws are driven in, often across many variants and small batches. Enact points out that only 4.6% of small and midsize companies in Germany use robots, compared with 24% of large companies. Galliker argues that China wins on volume while Europe can win on variety, and the robots are designed to learn tasks by being shown rather than being individually programmed.
Growth Plans and European Expansion
With the new capital, Enact plans to quintuple its team by the end of 2027, accelerate hardware development and research, and deploy its first robots with industrial partners. The company is already in talks with European businesses in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail, and food processing. Zurich was chosen as the base because of ETH Zurich, the robotics cluster in the Limmat Valley, and proximity to industrial customers.
Competitive Landscape
Enact is not alone in pursuing force-aware robotics. This week, the U.S. start-up Eka Robotics raised US$150 million at a US$1.45 billion valuation for a model that combines vision and force. Other competitors include Physical Intelligence in the United States, Neura Robotics, RobCo, and Agile Robots in Europe, while Switzerland's Gravis Robotics recently became a unicorn in construction robotics.
Enact has not yet disclosed concrete performance data or customers, so the practical effectiveness of its approach remains to be seen. The company's focus on combining touch with learning places it within a broader push to move robotics beyond vision-only automation. Its prospects will depend on successful deployments with industrial partners and on proving that its force-aware systems can deliver reliable results in real-world conditions.