Insider Brief
- Enact emerged from stealth with $30 million in pre-seed funding to develop physical AI that uses force and touch to give robots greater dexterity across industrial and other physical tasks.
- The Zurich startup is building a proprioceptive nervous system and cortex that uses signals from existing robot actuators to sense physical interactions in real time without extra hardware or fragile sensors.
- Backers include Redalpine, Notion Capital, Firstminute Capital, Yann LeCun and executives from Mistral, Path Robotics and Hugging Face, while Enact is hiring across robotics, AI research, mechanical engineering and infrastructure.
Zurich-based Enact has emerged from stealth with $30 million in pre-seed funding to develop physical AI that uses force and touch to give robots greater dexterity.
According to the company, the round includes backing from Redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital, along with Yann LeCun, Arthur Mensch of Mistral, Andrew Lonsberry of Path Robotics and Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face.
Enact said its technology is focused on automation where value comes from handling that variation rather than repeating the same high-volume task. Enact is building what it describes as a proprioceptive nervous system and cortex for robots, designed to give them whole-body awareness of force and physical interaction rather than relying mainly on vision and language.
The system senses what is happening in real time through a robot’s existing actuators without requiring extra hardware or fragile sensors. Enact said that force and touch feedback can help robots learn fine manipulation tasks more efficiently and perform them faster.
The startup indicated it is reworking multiple parts of the robotics stack, from sensors and actuators to AI model architectures. Its goal is to deploy robots across thousands of industrial and other physical tasks where conditions and objects can vary.
Enact is also hiring as it builds out its Zurich operation, with openings spanning robotics integration, controls, mechanical engineering, AI research and infrastructure. The company said its team includes people with experience at 1X, Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, Helsing, Amazon Robotics, Helbling and ETH.
