Enact raises a $30m pre-seed to give robots a sense of force and touch
Zurich robotics company Enact Intelligence has raised a $30m pre-seed from Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital for force aware robots.
Enact Intelligence, a robotics company based in Zurich, came out of stealth on 22 October 2026 with a $30 million pre-seed round. Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital backed the company. None of the reporting names a lead investor, so the round is best read as a $30 million pre-seed and nothing more. Three angels joined: Arthur Mensch, chief executive of Mistral, Yann LeCun, formerly chief artificial intelligence scientist at Meta, and Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face. Manuel Galliker, who worked at the robotics company Physical Intelligence before starting Enact, is chief executive and co-founder.
The company is building the stack that lets general purpose robots handle objects they were never programmed for. Most robot learning leans on cameras, and the resulting systems read a scene well but judge contact badly. Enact puts the sensing inside the actuator, so the motor at each joint reports how much force it is applying while it applies it, which is why the company designs its own motors rather than buying them in. Dealroom describes the approach as haptic intelligence and frames dexterity as the field's central bottleneck, the reason decades of research have still not produced a machine that can reliably peel an orange or untangle a cable. “In particular, our robots sense force and touch through their own actuators, so they feel what's happening in real time,” Galliker said.
The size of the cheque is as much the story as the technology. Sifted reported the round as the largest pre-seed ever raised in Switzerland. Dealroom places it in the top 1 per cent of seed stage rounds worldwide over the past 48 months, measured against a sample of 47,814 rounds. It also lands in a Swiss robotics cluster that has been pulling in capital steadily: Mimic Robotics raised $16 million in November 2025 for robot hands, and Gravis Robotics raised $23 million in December 2025 before a $200 million Series A from SoftBank in August 2026.
The money goes to expanding the team and accelerating hardware and research, with the near term work split between model architecture and the actuators that feed those models their data. “We're rethinking the full stack, from model architectures enabling multi-frequency and multi-scale intelligence,” Galliker said. The company has published no product timeline, no customer list and no headcount, which is ordinary at this stage and worth holding in mind when reading the number: this capital buys years of component work, not a launch.
Why it matters for AgTech founders: dexterity is the unsolved problem standing between specialty crop growers and an answer to their labour bill, and $30 million of pre-seed money has just gone into the layer that ag robotics teams normally buy rather than build. Three things are worth taking from it. First, Enact is vertically integrating the actuator because the signal it wants does not exist in an off the shelf motor. A harvesting or thinning robot that infers contact from a vision model and a current spike is making exactly that compromise, and it shows up later as bruised fruit and a damage rate the grower will not sign off. Second, this is where the general purpose robotics money is going, which means ag hardware teams are now bidding for control and perception engineers against budgets of this size. Third, read the structure rather than the headline figure. A pre-seed this large funds the component years before any revenue, whereas most ag robotics companies have to raise that same work against a paying pilot. If your machine depends on force sensing that nobody is building for agriculture, the honest options are to build it yourself, as Enact is doing, or to design the machine so that it never needs it.
Enact raises a $30m pre-seed to give robots a sense of force and touch
The Zurich company has come out of stealth with backing from Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, plus angel cheques from Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun and Thomas Wolf.
Enact Intelligence, a robotics company based in Zurich, came out of stealth on 22 October 2026 with a $30 million pre-seed round. Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital backed the company. None of the reporting names a lead investor, so the round is best read as a $30 million pre-seed and nothing more. Three angels joined: Arthur Mensch, chief executive of Mistral, Yann LeCun, formerly chief artificial intelligence scientist at Meta, and Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face. Manuel Galliker, who worked at the robotics company Physical Intelligence before starting Enact, is chief executive and co-founder.
The company is building the stack that lets general purpose robots handle objects they were never programmed for. Most robot learning leans on cameras, and the resulting systems read a scene well but judge contact badly. Enact puts the sensing inside the actuator, so the motor at each joint reports how much force it is applying while it applies it, which is why the company designs its own motors rather than buying them in. Dealroom describes the approach as haptic intelligence and frames dexterity as the field's central bottleneck, the reason decades of research have still not produced a machine that can reliably peel an orange or untangle a cable. “In particular, our robots sense force and touch through their own actuators, so they feel what's happening in real time,” Galliker said.
The size of the cheque is as much the story as the technology. Sifted reported the round as the largest pre-seed ever raised in Switzerland. Dealroom places it in the top 1 per cent of seed stage rounds worldwide over the past 48 months, measured against a sample of 47,814 rounds. It also lands in a Swiss robotics cluster that has been pulling in capital steadily: Mimic Robotics raised $16 million in November 2025 for robot hands, and Gravis Robotics raised $23 million in December 2025 before a $200 million Series A from SoftBank in August 2026.
The money goes to expanding the team and accelerating hardware and research, with the near term work split between model architecture and the actuators that feed those models their data. “We're rethinking the full stack, from model architectures enabling multi-frequency and multi-scale intelligence,” Galliker said. The company has published no product timeline, no customer list and no headcount, which is ordinary at this stage and worth holding in mind when reading the number: this capital buys years of component work, not a launch.
Why it matters for AgTech founders: dexterity is the unsolved problem standing between specialty crop growers and an answer to their labour bill, and $30 million of pre-seed money has just gone into the layer that ag robotics teams normally buy rather than build. Three things are worth taking from it. First, Enact is vertically integrating the actuator because the signal it wants does not exist in an off the shelf motor. A harvesting or thinning robot that infers contact from a vision model and a current spike is making exactly that compromise, and it shows up later as bruised fruit and a damage rate the grower will not sign off. Second, this is where the general purpose robotics money is going, which means ag hardware teams are now bidding for control and perception engineers against budgets of this size. Third, read the structure rather than the headline figure. A pre-seed this large funds the component years before any revenue, whereas most ag robotics companies have to raise that same work against a paying pilot. If your machine depends on force sensing that nobody is building for agriculture, the honest options are to build it yourself, as Enact is doing, or to design the machine so that it never needs it.
