Enact Intelligence Raises $30M to Give Robots a Sense of Touch

Zurich-based Enact Intelligence emerged from stealth on October 22 with a $30 million pre-seed round to give robots a sense of touch. The raise — one of the largest pre-seed rounds in European history, and the largest ever in Switzerland according to Sifted reporting — signals that investors now see physical dexterity, not language, as the next frontier for embodied AI.

Vision Is Not Enough: The Force-and-Touch Bet

Enact Intelligence argues that most robots today perceive the world almost entirely through cameras, which leaves them unreliable at the fine manipulation tasks where automation would matter most. Plugging in a cable, fitting a seal, driving a screw that catches — these jobs need force feedback as well as sight. Existing haptic solutions exist, but Enact says they are too costly and too fragile for industrial deployment.

Enact Intelligence's answer is what it calls a proprioceptive nervous system paired with a cortical model: bespoke actuators that capture force directly within the hardware, feeding a whole-body awareness of physical interaction into adapted video and AI models. The system senses what is happening in real time through a robot's own actuators — no extra hardware, no fragile sensor skins — and Enact Intelligence says force-and-touch feedback lets robots learn fine manipulation more efficiently and perform tasks faster.

Enact Intelligence is reworking the stack from hardware up, from actuators and sensors to model architectures, with a design meant to fit any form factor from a robotic arm to a humanoid. The target is the work where value comes from variation rather than repetition: automation that pays off because every object and condition is slightly different, not because a million identical parts roll down the line.

Who Is Betting $30 Million

The round was led by institutional investors redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, with a heavyweight angel roster: Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral; Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs and former chief AI scientist at Meta; Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics; and Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face, alongside ETH Zürich professors and Northvolt and Wingtra veterans. The company confirmed the backers in its own announcement and LinkedIn post, as reported by FinSMEs and Unite.AI.

Redalpine general partner Dr. Harald Nieder framed dexterity as robotics' next frontier in comments reported by EU-Startups, saying the firm's excitement rests on Enact's high-precision force data from bespoke actuators and the orthogonal data moat that force signals can build on top of existing models.

Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker brings deep pedigree: he previously led the software team for the NEO humanoid at 1X, helped build 1X's AI team in Silicon Valley, and worked at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence. The registered entity is Eta Robotics AG, founded in Zurich in 2026, and the company is hiring across robotics integration, controls, mechanical engineering, AI research and infrastructure.

Why Dexterity, Why Now

Swiss robotics funding has been active all year. Zurich's Mimic Robotics raised $16 million for robot hands in November 2025, and Gravis Robotics secured $23 million in December followed by a $200 million SoftBank-led Series A in August, as Dealroom reported. Enact Intelligence's $30 million lands well above both earlier pre-seed marks — unusual at this stage, and a read on how seriously investors take the dexterity bottleneck.

The pattern mirrors the funding wave sweeping the agent economy this month, from the DeepSeek $15 billion raise to agent-infrastructure plays like Reduck's browser-automation MCP and the Agentic AI Foundation's open agent projects. Capital is converging on the interfaces between AI and the physical or digital world it must act in — and touch is robotics' hardest interface of all.

What to watch: whether Enact Intelligence can convert force sensing into deployed industrial robots with real partners, and whether the no-fragile-sensors claim survives the factory floor. Enact Intelligence says it will use the funds to expand its team, accelerate hardware and R&D pipelines, and deploy robots with industrial partners. If that conversion succeeds, the next generation of automation will feel its way through work that robots have never reliably touched — and the biggest pre-seed in Swiss history will look prescient rather than pricey.