Enact Intelligence Exits Stealth with €26.68 Million Pre-Seed Financing Round

Enact Intelligence, a physical AI startup headquartered in Zurich, has came out of stealth with a €26.68 million ($30 million) pre-Seed funding round, marking one of the largest pre-Seed raises in Europe to date.

The investment round saw participation from institutional investors redalpine, Notion Capital, and firstminute capital, alongside angel investors including Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral; Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta; and Andrew Lonsberry, founder of Path Robotics.

Founded in March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, Enact is building robots that can not only see their environment but physically sense what is happening when they interact with it. Before founding Enact, Galliker led the software team for the humanoid robot NEO at 1X, helped build 1X's AI team in Silicon Valley, and went on to work at the robotics lab Physical Intelligence.

The central argument of Enact is that most robots today depend almost entirely on vision to perceive their surroundings, limiting their ability to manipulate objects reliably or learn efficiently from experience.

Existing haptic sensing solutions, which extend robots with force and touch, are either too costly or fragile for meaningful industrial deployment. To solve this physical AI challenge, Enact rethinks the entire stack, from model architectures and data pipelines through to actuators and sensors.

Dr. Harald Nieder, General Partner of redalpine, stated:

"Dexterity is the next frontier in robotics, and Enact is tackling it with a new data modality: starting with high precision force data from bespoke actuators they are rethinking the entire stack from the hardware up. We are very excited about Enact’s approach of leveraging orthogonal data to improve existing models and build a data moat."

Manuel Yves Galliker, CEO and founder of Enact Intelligence, stated:

"Unlike the early days of LLMs, physical AI has the advantage of starting from strong reasoning, language, and vision capabilities already in place. Instead of trying to collect every piece of data needed to teach a robot common sense about the world, we can build on top of existing models, like video models, and adapt them to output robot actions for interacting with the real world. So what we are addressing is the ability to efficiently learn from experience and perform tasks reliably, both of which require the model to understand the physics of the robot and the task at hand."

Enact's twelve-person team draws engineering talent from DeepMind, 1X, Amazon Robotics, Helsing, Physical Intelligence, and ETH Zurich. The startup announced bringing Philip Kneis, a former DeepTech investor at redalpine, to lead growth while planning to grow its team fivefold by the end of 2027.