Zurich-based physical AI startup Enact Intelligence has come out of stealth with €26.68 million ($30 million) in pre-seed funding. The round is one of the largest pre-seed funding raises in Europe so far.
The funding round included institutional investors redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital. Several well-known angel investors also participated, including Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral; Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta; and Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics.
Manuel Yves Galliker, CEO and founder of Enact Intelligence, said, “Unlike the early days of LLMs, physical AI has the advantage of starting from strong reasoning, language, and vision capabilities already in place. 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. So what we are addressing is the ability to efficiently learn from experience and perform tasks reliably, both of which require the model to understand the physics of the robot and the task at hand.”
Founded in March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, Enact is developing robots that can not only see their surroundings but also feel what happens when they touch or handle objects. Before starting Enact, Galliker led the software team for the NEO humanoid robot at 1X, helped build the company’s AI team in Silicon Valley, and later worked at robotics research lab Physical Intelligence.
Enact believes that most robots today rely too heavily on vision to understand their surroundings. This makes it difficult for them to handle objects accurately and learn effectively from experience.
Existing touch and force-sensing technologies help robots understand how much pressure they apply when interacting with objects. However, these systems are often too expensive or fragile for widespread use in industrial settings.
To address this challenge, Enact is developing a new approach to robotics that covers everything from AI models and data systems to the motors and sensors used by robots. Instead of relying on separate force sensors, its robots collect force data directly from their motors and actuators. This is similar to how humans sense tension through their muscles, rather than relying only on their fingertips.
“Dexterity is the next frontier in robotics, and Enact is tackling it with a new data modality: starting with high precision force data from bespoke actuators they are rethinking the entire stack from the hardware up. We are very excited about Enact’s approach of leveraging orthogonal data to improve existing models and build a data moat,” said Dr. Harald Nieder, General Partner of redalpine.
Enact will use the new funding to expand its team fivefold by the end of 2027, speed up hardware development and research, and introduce its robots through partnerships with companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail, and food processing.
