Zurich's Enact raises a $30m pre-seed to give robots a sense of touch
Backed by Mistral's Arthur Mensch and Yann LeCun, the startup is building robots that feel force through their own motors rather than relying only on cameras.
Enact Intelligence, a robotics startup based in Zurich, has emerged from stealth with a $30 million pre-seed round, the company announced on 22 October 2026. The round was backed by venture firms redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, with angel investors including Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, AI pioneer Yann LeCun and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.
Sifted reports that it is the largest pre-seed round ever raised in Switzerland.
Robots that feel, not just see
Most robotics companies teach machines to act mainly through cameras and vision models. Enact is taking a different route. It is building physics-based foundation models and hardware that let robots sense force and touch through their own actuators, the motors that move them, rather than through extra tactile sensors, according to Zurich.tech.
Lead investor Notion Capital explains the idea in two parts: tactile sensing at the skin, where robot sensors are still expensive and fragile, and kinaesthetic sensing, the force humans feel through muscle and tendon, which robotics has largely overlooked. Enact is working on both. The company says its approach can work on anything from a simple robot arm to a full humanoid.
The aim is better fine manipulation in tasks with frequent variation, where conventional automation is hard to deploy. Notion Capital says such manual and hybrid tasks account for 40 to 50 percent of manufacturing work today. Zurich.tech notes that the announcement does not include comparative performance measurements.
"We can build on top of existing models, like video models, and adapt them to output robot actions for interacting with the real world," Galliker told The Next Web. The company argues that robots which rely mainly on cameras struggle to handle objects, work reliably and learn from experience, while separate touch sensors tend to be too costly and fragile for factory work. Robot dexterity is drawing public money too: The Next Web notes that the UK's ARIA research agency is spending £52 million on dexterity projects, including electronic skin.
The team behind Enact
Enact was founded in March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, who previously led software for the NEO humanoid at robotics company 1X and then worked at robotics lab Physical Intelligence, according to The Next Web. Notion Capital says Galliker left San Francisco for Zurich in 2025. Founding engineer Matt Bennice, who previously worked at DeepMind and 1X, also moved from San Francisco to join.
The Next Web reports that Enact's 12-person team includes engineers from DeepMind, Amazon Robotics and defence company Helsing. Path Robotics founder Andrew Lonsberry is also among the angel investors.
"We're rethinking the full stack, from model architectures enabling multi-frequency and multi-scale intelligence, to the data pipelines all the way down to the actuators and sensors that feed the model," the company's CEO told Tech.eu.
Galliker said 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 told The Next Web.
The size of the round stands out in a European context. The Next Web reports that it is about four times the $7.2 million that Budapest's Allonic raised in February, which its investors called a Hungarian record.
What the money is for
Enact will use the funding to grow its team and speed up hardware and research work. The Next Web reports that it plans to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027 and is talking to large European companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing about first deployments.
What it means for European founders
A $30 million pre-seed is unusually large, and Tech.eu links it to investors' continued appetite for robotics. The round also shows how Europe's AI leaders are now backing the next generation directly: Arthur Mensch's Mistral is one of Europe's best-funded AI companies, and Mistral's €3 billion round was among the billion-euro deals that drove European tech funding to €27.8bn in Q3 2026.
For physical AI founders, Zurich is becoming a serious base: The Next Web notes that it is also home to Gravis Robotics, which raised $200 million in August. Earlier this month we covered another European bet on physical AI hardware, Düsseldorf chip startup Ubitium's $14m seed round.
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