UK VCs Notion Capital and Firstminute join $30m pre-seed for Swiss robotics startup Enact
Mistral's Arthur Mensch and Meta's Yann LeCun back Enact Intelligence, which is building touch-sensing tech for general purpose robots, with London investors among the backers.
Swiss robotics startup Enact Intelligence has come out of stealth with a $30m pre-seed round, one of the largest seen at this stage, and backing from two of the biggest names in European AI, Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch and former Meta AI chief scientist Yann LeCun.
The round also carries a UK thread. London-based venture firms Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital both feature among the institutional investors, alongside Swiss firm Redalpine. Angel investors in the round include Mensch, LeCun and Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf.
What Enact is building
Enact is developing the underlying technology for general purpose robots, with a focus on letting machines manipulate objects more accurately by sensing force and touch rather than relying primarily on cameras and visual input. The company says this approach should allow robots to work more reliably in industrial settings and other real-world environments.
Chief executive and co-founder Manuel Yves Galliker, who previously worked at US robotics startup Physical Intelligence, said: “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.”
He added that the company is “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.”
Why the size of the round matters
A $30m pre-seed round is unusually large, and Tech.eu notes it reflects the scale of investor appetite for robotics at present. The funds will be used to expand Enact’s team and accelerate both its hardware and R&D work, as the company looks to prove out its approach across different types of robots and tasks.
The UK angle
While Enact is a Swiss company, the presence of Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital in the round gives UK investors direct exposure to one of the more closely watched early-stage robotics bets in Europe this year. It is also a reminder that British venture firms are increasingly willing to write cheques into continental European deep tech and robotics plays rather than confining themselves to UK-based founders, as competition for access to high-profile AI-adjacent rounds intensifies.
For the wider UK ecosystem, the deal underlines how British capital is being deployed into a sector, humanoid and general purpose robotics, where the UK itself has relatively few scaled startups but where domestic investors are keen to secure a stake in category leaders wherever they are based.
What to watch next
Attention will now turn to how Enact deploys its funding, including whether it strikes partnerships with industrial customers to deploy its touch-sensing approach, and whether Notion Capital or Firstminute Capital increase their exposure in a future round. The involvement of Mensch and LeCun as named backers will also keep Enact under scrutiny as a bellwether for European robotics investment more broadly.