Enact Intelligence, a robotics firm based in Switzerland, has unveiled itself from stealth mode today with a $30 million pre-seed funding round. The round is backed by two prominent figures from France's artificial intelligence sector: Arthur Mensch, who leads Mistral AI, and Yann LeCun, Meta's former chief AI scientist.
The funding amount is notably substantial for a pre-seed stage investment, reflecting continued investor appetite for robotics ventures. The company's focus is on creating foundational technologies that power general-purpose robotic systems capable of operating in real-world environments.
Enact's core technology enables robots to handle objects with improved precision by leveraging force and touch sensing capabilities. Rather than depending primarily on visual input like many competing robotics firms, the startup employs a different methodology centered on tactile feedback to enhance robot performance in industrial and practical applications.
Manuel Yves Gallier, the company's chief executive and co-founder, previously held a position at Physical Intelligence, a prominent US-based robotics company. He explained the company's approach: "In particular, our robots sense force and touch through their own actuators, so they feel what's happening in real time, and learn more data-efficiently while simultaneously pushing reliability and performance. A technology that works across every form factor, built for real-world deployment from day one."
The investment consortium includes venture firms Redalpine, Notion Capital, and Firstminute Capital. Angel investors participating in the round include Mensch, LeCun, and Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face.
Enact plans to deploy the capital toward growing its workforce and advancing both hardware development and research initiatives. Gallier further noted: "We're rethinking the full stack, from model architectures enabling multi-frequency and multi-scale intelligence, to the data pipelines all the way down to the actuators and sensors that feed the model."
Source: Tech.eu
