Zurich's Enact exits stealth with $30M to give robots a sense of touch
The 12-person startup raised one of Europe's largest pre-seeds from redalpine, Notion and firstminute, plus Yann LeCun and Mistral's Arthur Mensch.
Zurich-based physical AI startup Enact Intelligence emerged from stealth on October 22 with a $30 million (€26.68M) pre-seed round — one of the largest pre-seed raises in Europe to date, and described as the largest in Swiss history — to build robots that can feel what they touch, not just see what surrounds them.
The company's bet is that vision alone has hit a wall in robotics. Cameras can tell a robot where a target is, but not how much force to apply, when to back off, or when to stop — which is why fine tasks like routing cables, fitting seals or driving screws still belong to human hands. Existing force-and-touch add-ons, Enact says, are too expensive and too fragile for the factory floor.
Enact's answer is to sense force inside the actuators themselves, the way humans sense effort through muscle tension rather than only at their fingertips. The startup describes the goal as a proprioceptive nervous system for robots, paired with a cortical model that interprets those signals into whole-body awareness of force and physical interaction. It is rethinking the full stack to get there — from model architectures and data pipelines down to its own actuators and sensors — and says the approach fits every form factor, from a simple arm to a full-scale humanoid.
The company was founded in March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, who previously led the software team for the NEO humanoid at 1X, helped build 1X's AI team in Silicon Valley, and then worked at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence. The 12-person team includes engineers from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence; Philip Kneis, previously a deeptech investor at redalpine, joined to lead growth. Enact deliberately chose Zurich over the Bay Area, arguing that Silicon Valley is thin on robotics and hardware engineering talent.
The round was backed by redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, with angels including Arthur Mensch (Mistral), Yann LeCun (AMI Labs), Andrew Lonsberry (Path Robotics), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Paolo Cerruti (Northvolt), ETH professors Marc Pollefeys and Thomas Hofmann, Elias Kleimann (Wingtra) and Ameet Patel. Dr. Harald Nieder of redalpine called dexterity the next frontier in robotics; Notion's Kamil Mieczakowski said robots will not generalise until they have a nervous system that lets them feel the world, not just see it.
Enact plans to grow fivefold by the end of 2027, accelerate its hardware and R&D pipelines, and seek first industrial deployments; it says it is already talking to major European players across manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing. The size of the bet stands out: recent Swiss robotics rounds include Mimic Robotics' $16M and Gravis Robotics' $23M, before Gravis' $200M Series A from SoftBank. Enact has disclosed no public demos or performance data, so its force-sensing claims remain unproven until hardware reaches partners.