Enact Intelligence raises $30M pre-seed, the largest in Swiss history

A record pre-seed round for Swiss robotics

Enact Intelligence, a Swiss startup officially known as Eta Robotics AG, has raised $30 million in a pre-seed funding round—the largest ever recorded in Switzerland. The round was led by venture firms Redalpine, Notion Capital, and Firstminute Capital, with additional backing from prominent figures in the AI ecosystem, including Yann LeCun, former AI chief scientist at Meta, and Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral. Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, and angel investor Andrew Lonsberry also participated.

How Enact’s technology stands out

Unlike most robotics companies, which rely primarily on cameras for perception, Enact Intelligence is developing robots that sense force and touch through their motors. This approach measures force inside the motors themselves, eliminating the need for separate, costly touch sensors. The technology is designed to work across a range of robot forms, from simple arms to humanoid designs, and could improve performance in industries where precision and dexterity are critical, such as manufacturing, infrastructure, and food processing.

Funds to fuel team expansion and hardware development

Enact plans to use the $30 million to expand its team fivefold by the end of 2027 and accelerate the development of its hardware and R&D. The company is currently hiring engineers, including AI researchers with expertise in pre-training—building models from scratch. It is also developing physical components like actuators, which combine electric motors with control chips, and plans to power its robots using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Zurich as an emerging robotics hub

Enact’s decision to base its operations in Zurich, rather than Silicon Valley, reflects the growing strength of Europe’s robotics ecosystem. The city is already home to Gravis Robotics, which raised $200 million in August for autonomous excavation software. Enact’s team includes engineers from DeepMind, Amazon Robotics, and Helsing, and the company is in discussions with large European firms to deploy its robots in manufacturing, retail, and food processing sectors.

What this means

Lazyfounder analysis — our interpretation, not reported fact.

Enact Intelligence’s $30 million pre-seed round is a rare outlier in scale, particularly for a Swiss startup. For founders and operators, this signals two key trends: first, that hardware-focused robotics startups are attracting serious capital if they promise a breakthrough in how robots interact with the physical world; second, that European deep-tech hubs like Zurich are becoming viable alternatives to Silicon Valley for building hardware-heavy companies. The participation of AI luminaries like Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch also suggests that the next wave of robotics may be as much about advances in actuator-level sensing and pre-training as about better cameras or algorithms.

Key takeaways

• The $30 million pre-seed round is the largest ever raised in Switzerland, setting a new benchmark for early-stage hardware startups in Europe.
• Enact’s focus on force and touch sensing through motors—rather than cameras—could redefine how robots operate in industries like manufacturing and food processing.
• The involvement of prominent AI leaders like Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch underscores the growing convergence between AI research and robotics hardware development.
• Founders in robotics should note the appeal of Zurich as a base for hardware startups, given its emerging ecosystem and access to talent from companies like DeepMind and Amazon Robotics.

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