The engineer who taught 1X's NEO to walk just raised $30 million to give robots a sense of touch
Robots that feel?
Most robots see the world. Very few feel it.
That's the bet behind Enact Intelligence, a Zurich startup that came out of stealth last week with a $30 million pre-seed round. Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker led the team at 1X that taught the NEO humanoid to walk, then worked at Physical Intelligence. In March, he went home to Zurich and started Enact.
Seven months later, he has 12 people, a $30 million check, and a cap table most seed-stage founders would kill for.
The round came from redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital, with angels including Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and Path Robotics founder Andrew Lonsberry. Sifted calls it the largest pre-seed ever raised in Switzerland. For a sense of scale: Budapest's Allonic raised $7.2 million in February and its investors called that a Hungarian record. Enact's round is roughly 4X that.
Measuring force inside motors
So what are they building?
Most robots today rely almost entirely on cameras. That works fine for picking a box off a shelf. It works a lot less well for plugging in a cable, fitting a seal or starting a screw that catches, because the thing that matters is happening at the point of contact, often hidden by the robot's own hand. Tactile skins and fingertip sensors can help, but they tend to be expensive and fragile, and on a factory line they wear out.
Enact's approach is to skip the skin and measure force inside the motors instead, the way you feel tension in your arm when a bolt starts to bite before your fingertips tell you anything.
"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," Galliker said in the company's announcement. "A technology that works across every form factor, built for real-world deployment from day one."
Enact says the approach works on anything from a simple arm to a full humanoid, which means it isn't betting on any one body. It's also not building every piece from scratch on the AI side. According to The Next Web, Galliker says Enact can "build on top of existing models, like video models, and adapt them to output robot actions for interacting with the real world."
The full stack solution
But the company is clearly thinking about the whole stack.
"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," Galliker says.
The first target is not the car plant.
Big automotive lines, where the same motion repeats thousands of times a day, have been automated for decades. Enact is going after the last steps of final assembly ... small batches, lots of variants, the kind of work where programming a robot for each version doesn't pay, so people still do it. Enact cites German data showing just 4.6% of small and midsize companies use robots, versus 24% of large ones. (The company hasn't pointed to a primary source for those numbers, but the pattern is familiar: the smaller the batch, the less the automation.)
Automation for small-batch variety
Galliker sums it up in one line: "China wins on volume; we win on variety."
It's a smart positioning line, and it's grounded in reality. China accounted for 95% of humanoid shipments in the IDC data I covered last month. Europe isn't going to out-manufacture Shenzhen on unit count anytime soon. But, as I've argued before, China's massive humanoid lead says more about volume than it does about capability. High-mix, low-volume European manufacturing is a real niche, and arguably one where dexterity matters more than scale.
Touch is getting crowded, though.
1X itself just shipped tendon-driven, force-transparent hands for NEO. Tesla has been thinking about giving robots skin. Sanctuary AI has spent years on hydraulic hands with tactile sensing, and the UK's ARIA agency is putting £52 million into robot dexterity research. Enact's differentiator is the actuator-first approach: no fragile sensor skin to replace every few months.
Why in Switzerland?
There's a geography story here. Galliker studied at ETH Zurich and did research in Marco Hutter's lab, and he picked Zurich over the Bay Area on purpose.
"Silicon Valley has traditionally been very strong in software and AI, but it's lacking in robotics and hardware engineering talent," he told The Next Web.
Zurich is also home to Gravis Robotics, which raised $200 million in August for autonomous construction machines, plus ANYbotics and a deep bench of ETH spinouts. Raphael Levy, Foxglove's head of Europe, put it bluntly in a LinkedIn post on the raise: "Touch is having a moment, and Zurich is the robotics capital of Europe. I'll keep dying on this hill."
What Enact hasn't shown yet: a product, a customer, or published performance data. That's normal at pre-seed, even a $30 million one. The company says it plans to grow the team fivefold by the end of 2027, accelerate hardware development, and is talking with large European companies in manufacturing, infrastructure, retail and food processing about first deployments.
That's a lot of runway for a seven-month-old company.
Sources
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I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”