Enact Says It Raised $30m for Robots That Feel

Enact Intelligence, a Zurich robotics start-up founded in March, has come out of stealth with $30m in pre-seed funding to build robots that sense force and touch as well as see. The company announced the round on Thursday, naming venture firms redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital as investors.

London-based Notion Capital said in its own post that it is co-leading the round with redalpine. Enact has not disclosed a valuation.

Enact says it measures force inside the motors

Enact’s argument is that robots which rely mostly on cameras struggle to handle objects, work reliably and learn from experience. According to the announcement, existing touch sensors are “too expensive and too brittle for real industrial deployment”.

Instead of separate sensors that measure force at a single point, the company says it “captures force in the actuators themselves, much as humans sense force through the tension in their muscles, not only at their fingertips”. It says the approach will work for “every form factor, from a simple arm to a full-scale humanoid”. Enact has not published performance figures, shown a product or given dates for one.

Founder Manuel Yves Galliker previously led the software team for the NEO humanoid at 1X and then worked at Physical Intelligence, the robotics lab whose models TSN has covered. “Instead of trying to collect every piece of data needed to teach a robot common sense about the world, we can build on top of existing models, like video models, and adapt them to output robot actions for interacting with the real world,” he said in the announcement.

Enact and its backers list different angel investors

Enact calls its round “one of the largest pre-seed rounds raised in Europe to date”, a claim it does not back with figures. Tech.eu reported that the sum “is high for a pre-seed funding round”.

The announcement lists three angel investors: Mistral founder Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, and Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics. Notion Capital and Tech.eu instead name Mensch, LeCun and Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf, and leave Lonsberry out.

Harald Nieder, a general partner at redalpine, said in the announcement that Enact is “tackling it with a new data modality”. Kamil Mieczakowski, a general partner at Notion Capital, said: “Robots won’t generalise until they have a nervous system, one that lets them not only see the world but feel it.”

Notion Capital pitches the round on factory labour

Notion Capital’s post sets out its own investment case, and its figures are its own. It says Enact is building a foundation model and robots aimed at manual and hybrid tasks that “account for 40–50% of manufacturing work today”, and that wire harnessing, the cabling inside cars, planes and electronics, “is a $100bn market and 80% of it is still done by hand”. It describes Enact as taking “the Apple approach” of building its own hardware and software.

The money buys hiring and hardware, not yet customers

For a company barely seven months old, the round is large, and the sources say little about what it has built. Enact says it has a twelve-person team drawn from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence, and that it will use the money to grow fivefold by the end of 2027, speed up hardware and research work, and deploy its first robots with industrial partners.

Those partners are not yet named. The company says only that it is “in discussions with major European industry players across manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing”. It gives no signed customers, no prototype dates and no technical results. Investors are, at this stage, backing a team and an idea about sensing rather than a product it has shown publicly.

The pitch also differs from rivals in where it starts. Dream Labs, which left stealth this week with a $90m seed round, opened with a public API for its robot model. Enact is starting with its own actuators, arguing that force data is what camera-led robots lack. TSN’s survey of how robots are learning to be human covers other approaches to the same problem. (TSN tracks rounds like this on its AI funding hub.)

Enact chose Zurich over the Bay Area on purpose. Silicon Valley “is lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent”, Galliker said, “and with the current excitement around robotics a lot of money is chasing a few people.” With $30m, Enact has become one of the companies doing the chasing.