Swiss robotics startup Enact Intelligence, legally known as Eta Robotics AG, has secured $30 million in a pre-seed funding round. The investment round included contributions from AI researcher Yann LeCun, Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, and several venture capital firms.
The company was founded this year by CEO Manuel Yves Galliker, a former engineer at Physical Intelligence and 1X Technologies. The team includes former employees from Google DeepMind and Amazon. Enact plans to use the capital to expand its engineering team and further develop its technology.
Enact is building AI models designed to control various robot form factors, moving away from models tailored to specific designs. The company is also developing its own hardware, specifically actuators that function as both mechanical muscles and sensors capable of measuring force and touch.
To support its hardware, Enact intends to utilize field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for improved performance and power efficiency. The company is currently hiring researchers to focus on pre-training AI models from scratch rather than relying on existing open-source solutions.
