Enact Intelligence: giving robots a sense of force and touch
the problem
Robots today can see the world, but they can't feel it. That single missing sense is why real-world deployments keep stalling, despite billions flowing into physical AI. Pure vision-to-action approaches hit a wall as soon as a task requires genuine dexterity.
Enact Intelligence is changing this. Founded in March 2026, the Zurich-based company is building robots that see their surroundings and also sense the forces at play when they interact with their environment. By feeding torque and touch data directly from the actuators into a foundation model alongside vision and language, they are pioneering whole-body force-awareness. The result is robots that understand the physics of the task at hand, learn efficiently from experience, and perform reliably in the real world.
our investment
We are delighted to announce our investment in Enact’s $30M pre-seed round, together with Notion Capital and firstminute capital. We are joined by an impressive group of angels, including Arthur Mensch (founder of Mistral), Yann LeCun (founder of AMI Labs and former chief AI scientist at Meta), Andrew Lonsberry (founder of Path Robotics), and David Wallerstein (former chief exploration officer at Tencent).
We backed Enact because they combine three things we rarely see together: an outstanding founder, defensible hardware, and a new data signal that today’s robotics models lack, all aimed at one of the biggest unsolved problems in robotics. We are not the only ones who believe in their mission, as this marks the largest pre-seed round ever raised by a Swiss startup.
teaching robots to feel
Force and touch sensing have long promised greater robotic dexterity, but existing solutions remain too expensive and too brittle for real industrial deployment.
Enact is tackling this end to end, from model architectures and data pipelines down to the actuators and sensors that feed the model. They are building a proprioceptive nerve system and the cortex that makes sense of it. It starts with the hardware: torque visibility in traditional actuators is notoriously low, so Enact designs and builds their own for maximum torque transparency, a hard problem that creates strong, defensible differentiation. From day one, they have also stayed within the cost and reliability constraints needed to make this useful across thousands of industrial tasks, and their technology is designed to benefit every form factor, from a simple arm to a full-scale humanoid.
As our general partner Harald shares: “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.”
a stellar team, combining deep robotics knowledge and product execution
Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker is an exceptional full-stack roboticist. He helped develop the NEO humanoid at 1X Technologies and was a member of the technical staff at Physical Intelligence, two of the world’s leading physical AI labs. Before that, he earned an MSc in Robotics at ETH Zurich, did research at ETH’s Rehabilitation Engineering Lab and held a visiting research position at Caltech focused on robotic control and flight dynamics. Few founders pair this academic depth with hands-on experience building general-purpose humanoids and vision-language-action models on both sides of the Atlantic.
Manuel has already assembled a nine-person team with engineers from DeepMind, Amazon Robotics, and Helsing. Philip Kneis, previously a deeptech investor on our team, has also joined Enact to lead growth. On the topic of talent, building in Zurich over the Bay Area was a deliberate decision to capitalize on Swiss engineering talent.
In Manuel’s words: “Silicon Valley has traditionally been very strong in software and AI, but it’s lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent, and with the current excitement around robotics a lot of money is chasing a few people. What we will do is bring the AI experience with us from Silicon Valley and combine it with Zurich’s local talent pool. That’s the winning formula.”
As a fund that has long backed the local Swiss ecosystem, we couldn’t agree more. Beyond ETH's robotics expertise, Zurich also puts Enact at the heart of Europe’s industrial base, giving them early access to the demanding dexterity use cases and real-world data that will shape their technology from the start.
what’s next for Enact
With this funding, Enact plans to quadruple their team by the end of 2027, accelerate their hardware and R&D pipelines, and deploy their first robots with industrial partners. Talks with major European industry players across infrastructure, retail, and food processing are already underway.
Harald and Florian have worked with Manuel and his team from the early days, and we look forward to supporting the entire team on their ambitious road ahead. Welcome to the redalpine family, Enact!