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Zurich robotics startup Enact Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a €26.7M ($30M) pre-seed round, which it says is Switzerland's largest, to build robots that sense force and touch.
Key Takeaways
- Enact Intelligence raised a €26.7M ($30M) pre-seed round on October 22, 2026, and left stealth.
- redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital led. Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch invested as angels.
- The company was founded in March 2026 and has 12 staff. It plans to grow the team fivefold by the end of 2027.
Lead
Enact Intelligence, a Zurich-based physical-AI company, announced a €26.68M ($30M) pre-seed round on October 22, 2026. The company was founded in March 2026, so it raised this sum roughly seven months after incorporation. redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital led the round, and the company has not disclosed a valuation.
Angel investors include Yann LeCun, the former Meta chief AI scientist who founded AMI Labs, and Arthur Mensch, the co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI. Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics, also invested. The company describes the round as the largest pre-seed in Swiss history.
What Does Enact Intelligence Build?
Enact builds robots that combine vision with a sense of force and touch. Most current robot-learning systems depend on camera data. Enact argues that robots also need to feel contact, and that physical-interaction signals add training information cameras cannot capture.
The company's technical approach puts force sensing inside the actuators, the joints that move the robot, rather than adding expensive external sensors. It describes the result as a "proprioceptive nerve system" that gives the robot whole-body force awareness and dexterity. Target sectors are manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing in Europe.
The pitch targets a known weakness. Humanoid and general-purpose robots can often perceive a scene but handle fine manipulation poorly, particularly when contact forces matter.
Who Is Behind Enact Intelligence?
Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker previously led the software team for the 1X humanoid robot NEO and built 1X's AI team in Silicon Valley. He also worked at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence. Philip Kneis, a former deeptech investor at redalpine, has joined as an operator.
The 12-person team includes engineers from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence. Galliker has said the company wants to combine the AI experience it brought from Silicon Valley with Zurich's local talent pool.
How Will the Money Be Used?
Enact will spend the capital on three things: a fivefold headcount increase by the end of 2027, faster hardware and R&D pipelines, and first robot deployments with industrial partners. The company has not named those partners or given a deployment date.
At $30M, the round funds a hardware company for a limited period. Robotics hardware development is capital-hungry, and a team growing from 12 to roughly 60 people will use a large share of the cash on salaries alone. A seed or Series A within 18 to 24 months looks likely.
Why Does a Pre-Seed This Size Matter?
A €26.7M pre-seed of this size reflects how investors now price teams with direct experience at leading robotics labs, not how much product exists. Enact has no disclosed commercial robot, customers or revenue. The investment case rests on the founding team's background and the thesis that tactile data improves robot learning.
That thesis has support in principle but is unproven at scale. The open question, which the company's own framing leaves unanswered, is whether skills learned through physical interaction transfer to new tasks beyond the initial demonstrations. Camera-based approaches from better-funded US competitors are improving quickly, and they may close part of the dexterity gap without dedicated force hardware.
The investor list is notable for its European weighting. redalpine is Zurich-based, and Mensch and LeCun are two of the continent's most prominent AI figures. The round fits a pattern of European capital backing physical AI to avoid ceding the category to US and Chinese players.
What Comes Next for Enact?
The next milestone is a working industrial deployment, which would show whether force-aware actuators deliver measurable gains over vision-only systems. Hiring is the near-term constraint, since the company must add roughly 48 people in about 14 months while competing with US labs for robotics engineers.
If early pilots show that touch data improves task transfer, Enact could raise a larger round at a materially higher valuation. If not, the company would face a harder case against vision-first rivals with larger war chests.
Outlook
Enact Intelligence enters the market with €26.7M, a 12-person team from DeepMind, 1X and Physical Intelligence, and a specific technical bet on force and touch sensing. Its results will be judged on industrial pilots, not on the size of the round. The company has no disclosed valuation, customers or revenue, and investors are betting on the team and the thesis.
