Yann LeCun and Mistral’s Chief Invest in Zurich Robotics Start-Up Enact

Enact Intelligence has come out of stealth in Zurich with a $30 million pre-seed round, and the investor list is doing plenty of the talking. Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital joined angel backers Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch, the founder of Mistral. For a young robotics company, that is a loud entrance.

The pitch is simple enough to explain and hard enough to build: cameras alone are not enough. Enact says today’s robots still struggle to handle real-world objects reliably, especially when a task needs feel as much as sight. Plugging in a cable, fitting a seal or starting a screw can still be awkward manual work. The company argues that existing force- and touch-based systems are usually too expensive or too fragile for factory use.

So Enact is building the whole stack itself, from the AI models and data flow to its own actuators and sensors. The idea is a robot “nervous system” that senses force across the body, down to the fingertips, plus a “cortex” that turns those signals into movement. It is meant to work across different robot shapes, from a basic arm to a humanoid. And rather than program every task by hand, the system is supposed to learn from being shown what to do.

Chief executive Manuel Yves Galliker says the company is focused on two bottlenecks: learning efficiently from experience and doing tasks reliably. That choice of problem fits his background. He founded Enact in March after leading the team at 1X that taught the NEO robot to walk, then worked at Physical Intelligence in the U.S. The 12-person team also pulls people from Google DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and Physical Intelligence.

Enact’s first targets are the final steps of assembly, the awkward little jobs that still trip up machines in small batches and many variants. The company points to Germany, where only 4.6 percent of small and midsize companies use robots, versus 24 percent of large ones. Funding is meant to help Enact grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027, speed up hardware work and research, and place its first robots with industrial partners. Talks are already underway with companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing.