Enact Intelligence raises $30M pre-seed for force-aware robotics

Zurich-based Enact Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $30 million pre-seed round. Investors include redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, alongside Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. The financing will fund recruitment and hardware research and development.

Enact is building robots that sense force and touch through their actuators. CEO and co-founder Manuel Yves Galliker says this feedback lets the system respond to physical contact in real time and learn manipulation skills more efficiently. The engineering spans model architectures, data pipelines, sensors and actuation, connecting the information a robot collects with the movements it learns to perform.

Galliker previously worked at Physical Intelligence. In a public explanation of Enact’s technical direction ahead of the financing announcement, he described a development process in which the robot’s body supplies training signals as well as executing actions. The team is designing actuation and sensing to capture information about interaction forces alongside visual observations.

The intended application is general-purpose fine manipulation, including industrial work. Force feedback can help a control system adjust movements as an object resists, slips or makes contact with another surface. Enact is recruiting across mechanical engineering, electronics, software and AI in Zurich as it develops this combined hardware and learning system.