Enact Intelligence, a Zurich startup building force-sensing technology for robots, has raised $30m in pre-seed funding and emerged from stealth. The company announced the round on 22 October 2026.
Venture firms redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital invested, alongside angel investors Arthur Mensch, the founder of Mistral, Yann LeCun, the founder of AMI Labs and former chief AI scientist at Meta, and Andrew Lonsberry, the founder of Path Robotics. The release did not name a lead investor, and the company did not disclose a valuation.
Enact called the round one of the largest pre-seed rounds raised in Europe so far. The Next Web cited Sifted as reporting that it is the largest pre-seed round ever raised in Switzerland.
“Robots won't generalise until they have a nervous system, one that lets them not only see the world but feel it.”Kamil Mieczakowski, General Partner, Notion Capital
What Enact does
Most robots today depend mainly on cameras to understand what is around them, which makes it harder for them to handle objects, work reliably and learn from experience. Touch and force sensors exist, but Enact said they are usually too costly and fragile for factory use.
Enact's approach is to measure force inside the robot's actuators rather than at single sensor points, which the company compared to people feeling the tension in their muscles as well as at their fingertips. It says it is working on the whole stack, from model architectures and data pipelines down to the actuators and sensors, and that the technology can apply to anything from a simple robot arm to a full humanoid.
Founder Manuel Yves Galliker said in the release that physical AI can start from existing reasoning, language and vision capabilities, and that Enact plans to adapt existing models, such as video models, so that they output robot actions.
The team
Galliker founded Enact in March 2026. He previously led the software team for 1X's NEO humanoid, helped build 1X's AI team in Silicon Valley and then worked at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence. Tech.eu described him as chief executive and co-founder.
The company has 12 people, with engineers who previously worked at DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence. Philip Kneis, previously a deeptech investor at redalpine, has joined to lead growth.
Enact said it chose to build in Zurich rather than the Bay Area to draw on Swiss engineering talent. Galliker said Silicon Valley is strong in software and AI but short of robotics and hardware engineers.
Who invested
Dr Harald Nieder, a general partner at redalpine, said in the release that Enact was tackling dexterity with a new type of data, starting with high-precision force readings from its own actuators. Kamil Mieczakowski, a general partner at Notion Capital, said Zurich had become a centre for robotics.
Tech.eu's list of angel investors also included Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face, who was not named in the company's release.
What the money is for
Enact plans to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027, speed up its hardware and R&D work and deploy its first robots with industrial partners. The company said it is already in talks with large European companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing, though it did not name any.
The round adds to recent investment in robotics in Europe. The Next Web noted that Zurich's Gravis Robotics raised $200m in August for autonomous excavator software, and that Budapest-based Allonic raised $7.2m in February.
Company website: enact-intelligence.com