Zurich's Enact raises $30M pre-seed from Mistral's Mensch and LeCun to give robots a sense of touch
What's the deal? Zurich-based Enact IntelligenceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has come out of stealth with a $30 million pre-seed round to build robots that can feel force and touch, the company announced. Redalpine and Notion Capital co-led, with Firstminute Capital also investing. Angels include Mistral's Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCunDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and Path Robotics founder Andrew Lonsberry. Enact calls it one of the largest pre-seed rounds raised in Europe to date. Dealroom data puts it in the top 1% of seed-stage rounds globally over the past four years.
Who's behind it? Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker started the company in March 2026. He previously led the software team for the NEO humanoid at 1X and then worked at Physical Intelligence. The 12-person team includes engineers from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence. Enact plans to grow the team fivefold by the end of 2027 and is in talks with European manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food-processing companies about first deployments.
What's different? Most robots rely mainly on cameras. Enact measures force in its own actuators, "much as humans sense force through the tension in their muscles", so its models can learn dexterous tasks from touch as well as vision. Redalpine's Harald Nieder calls dexterity "the next frontier in robotics".
The bigger picture: Galliker moved from San Francisco to Zurich to build the company. "Silicon Valley has traditionally been very strong in software and AI, but it's lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent," he said. Notion Capital calls Zurich's Limmat Valley "the Silicon Valley of robotics". In its investment post, the firm cites Revelio Labs data, published with The Economist, showing that more tech workers now move from the US to Europe than the other way round. Most of the money in this robotics wave has gone to vision-first hardware. A $30 million first cheque for touch shows investors think the missing piece may be physical, not just a bigger model.
Sources: Enact via Startupticker · Tech.eu · Notion Capital · The Next Web
Image: the Enact team. Credit: Enact Intelligence
