Enact Intelligence, a Zurich-based physical AI startup, emerged from stealth on Thursday with a $30 million pre-seed round to build robots that can feel force and touch, not just see. The round, roughly €27 million, came from redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, with Mistral founder Arthur Mensch, AMI Labs founder Yann LeCun and Path Robotics founder Andrew Lonsberry joining as angel investors. Enact did not disclose a valuation.
Manuel Yves Galliker founded Enact Intelligence in March 2026, and the company now has 12 employees drawn from Google DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence. Galliker previously led software and controls work on 1X's NEO humanoid, including the team that taught the robot to walk, and later worked at Physical Intelligence. Philip Kneis, formerly a deep tech investor at redalpine, has joined to lead growth.
The pitch centers on force sensing. Most robot models lean on cameras, and vision-based policies struggle with inserting, clicking and tightening, where a small position error turns into a large force error. Rather than bolting on costly sensors at single points, Enact captures force inside the actuators themselves.
“Dexterity is the next frontier in robotics.”— Harald Nieder, General Partner, redalpine
Key facts
- 01Enact Intelligence raised a $30M (about €27M) pre-seed round from redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital.
- 02Angel investors include Yann LeCun, Mistral founder Arthur Mensch and Path Robotics founder Andrew Lonsberry.
- 03Founded in March 2026 by ex-1X engineer Manuel Yves Galliker, the Zurich company has 12 employees.
- 04Enact plans to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027 and deploy first robots with industrial partners.
- 05Target work is small-batch final assembly: plugging cables, snapping clips, fitting seals and driving screws.
Enact describes its architecture in biological terms. A proprioceptive "nervous system" senses force across the robot's whole body, down to the fingertips, and a "cortex" is the AI model that interprets those signals and controls movement. The company builds its own actuators, sensors and models, and adapts existing models, such as video models, to output robot movements.
To gather training data, Enact is hiring remote robot operators in Zurich to teleoperate its machines and generate demonstrations. The system is designed to run on any form factor, from a single robotic arm to a full-scale humanoid, though Enact has not said which robot it will deploy first.
Its initial target is final assembly: plugging in cables, snapping in clips, fitting seals and driving screws, often in small batches with many product variants rather than on high-volume automotive lines. Enact cites figures showing that 4.6% of German small and midsize companies use robots, compared with 24% of large companies.
Galliker frames that focus as the company's answer to Chinese manufacturers, which accounted for nearly 90% of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped in 2025. Enact Intelligence is betting that variety-heavy European production lines need dexterity more than they need scale.
“China wins on volume; we win on variety.”— Manuel Yves Galliker, Founder and CEO of Enact Intelligence
The new capital will go toward growing the team fivefold by the end of 2027, accelerating hardware and R&D, and deploying the first robots with industrial partners. Enact says it is already in talks with European companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing, but it has not named any customers.
The company chose Zurich over the Bay Area for its engineering talent, its proximity to ETH Zurich and the local robotics cluster, and its closeness to industrial customers. Galliker studied mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich and did research in Marco Hutter's lab there before joining 1X.
Enact enters a crowded field that includes Physical Intelligence, Neura Robotics, RobCo, Agile Robots and Gravis Robotics, and Eka Robotics raised $150 million at a $1.45 billion valuation the same week. Enact has not yet published success rates, cycle times or demo videos.
The startup announced the $30 million round as one of the largest pre-seed financings in Europe to date, with three venture firms and three founder-angels on the cap table before it has shipped a robot.
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