Enact Intelligence raises $30M pre-seed for robots

Enact Intelligence has closed a $30 million pre-seed round, an unusually large first raise for a company founded in 2026. SiliconANGLE identifies the legal entity as Eta Robotics AG, based in Switzerland. The angel list reads like a roll call of European AI: Yann LeCun, Mistral AI chief executive Arthur Mensch and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.

Touch instead of vision

Most robot learning stacks lean on cameras. Enact is betting the robot should feel the task instead: it builds its own actuators with force and touch sensing integrated, so the machine registers contact as it happens. Galliker, the CEO and a Physical Intelligence alumnus, describes the work as “rethinking the full stack” — model architecture, data pipelines, then the actuators and sensors feeding the model. The claimed payoff is more accurate manipulation and learning that needs less data; neither outlet publishes a benchmark for either claim.

One model, many bodies

Rather than tuning algorithms to a single chassis, Enact wants models that carry across robot form factors and configurations. It intends to pre-train from scratch instead of adapting open-weight models, and to put FPGAs on the robot as the compute layer. Both choices cost money up front, which is the plainest reading of why a pre-seed round is this large.

Who is in, and what is missing

Tech.eu names Redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital as the institutional investors; SiliconANGLE refers only to a consortium of unnamed venture firms. Neither report gives a valuation, a headcount, a ship date or an industrial customer. The money is earmarked for engineering hires plus hardware and R&D, with recruits coming from Google DeepMind, Amazon, Physical Intelligence and 1X Technologies.