Backed by Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch, Swiss Physical AI startup Enact Intelligence exits stealth with €26.68 million

Enact Intelligence, a physical AI startup headquartered in Zurich, has come out of stealth today with a €26.68 million ($30 million) pre-Seed funding round, one of the largest pre-Seed raises in Europe to date.

The round saw participation from institutional investors redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, alongside a notable slate of angel investors, 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.

“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.

Founded in March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, Enact is building robots that can not only see their environment but physically sense what is happening when they interact with it. Before founding Enact, Galliker led the software team for the humanoid robot NEO at 1X, helped build 1X’s AI team in Silicon Valley, and went on to work at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence.

The central argument of Enact is that most robots today depend almost entirely on vision to perceive their surroundings, limiting their ability to manipulate objects reliably or learn efficiently from experience. Existing haptic sensing solutions, which extend robots with force and touch, are either too costly or fragile for meaningful industrial deployment.

To solve this physical AI challenge, Enact rethinks the entire stack, from model architectures and data pipelines through to the actuators and sensors that feed the model. As a departure from traditional robots relying on point-based force sensors, Enact’s robots capture force data directly from the actuators themselves, similar to how humans sense tension through their muscles rather than solely through their fingertips.

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.”

This approach, Galliker argues, will lead to the development of “a proprioceptive nerve system and the cortex that makes sense of it,” solving dexterity through whole-body force-awareness at a cost and reality-level suitable for industrial scale.

Enact’s twelve-person team draws its engineering talent from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing, Physical Intelligence and ETH Zurich. Alongside the funding, the company announced bringing Philip Kneis, a former DeepTech investor at redalpine, to lead growth.

“Silicon Valley has traditionally been very strong in software and AI, but it’s lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent, and with the current excitement around robotics a lot of money is chasing a few people. What we will do is bring the AI experience with us from Silicon Valley and combine it with Zürich’s local talent pool. That’s the winning formula,” added Galliker.

The fresh capital will be used to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027, accelerate its hardware and R&D pipelines, and roll out its robots with multiple industrial partners across manufacturing, infrastructure, retail, and food processing.

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