Enact Intelligence, a Swiss robotics start-up registered as Eta Robotics AG, has raised $30 million in pre-seed funding, SiliconANGLE reported on October 22, 2026. Individual backers include AI researcher Yann LeCun, Mistral AI chief executive Arthur Mensch and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, alongside several venture firms that were not named. Founder and chief executive Manuel Yves Galliker previously held engineering roles at Physical Intelligence and 1X Technologies.
Why it matters: it is the second round in a week, after Eka Robotics, priced on the idea that robots need to feel force and contact, not only see.
Key Facts
- $30M pre-seed, announced October 22, 2026; valuation not disclosed
- Named individual investors: Yann LeCun, Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face)
- Founder and CEO: Manuel Yves Galliker, formerly at Physical Intelligence and 1X; company launched earlier in 2026
- Plan: control models for many robot designs, pre-trained from scratch; actuators that also sense force and touch; FPGA compute
What is Enact building?
Three pieces, according to SiliconANGLE. The first is AI models for controlling robots, designed to work across a wide range of robot designs rather than one form factor. The second is actuators, the motor-and-control-chip units that move a robot’s joints, which also act as sensors and, in the company’s words, “sense force and touch.” The third is compute: Enact plans to use field-programmable gate arrays to run its robots.
Enact is hiring an AI researcher for pre-training, which means building models from scratch rather than adapting open-source ones. The team includes former employees of Google DeepMind and Amazon. The money goes to hiring engineers. Enact has not disclosed a product, a customer or a launch date.
Why do the investors matter?
The named backers sit at the model layer. Mensch runs Mistral, the Paris language-model developer; Wolf co-founded Hugging Face, the main hub for open models, which also builds low-cost robots. LeCun has argued publicly that language models alone will not reach human-level intelligence and has backed learning from the physical world; our explainer on world models covers that bet.
The size stands out for a company with no announced product. For scale, it is about half the $58 million seed that Physical Superintelligence raised at its launch in September.
Enact’s actuator idea is the same argument Eka made two days earlier with a gripper: that contact information is the missing input. Eka measures force at the hand; Enact proposes to read it from every joint. Neither has published independent results.
Frequently Asked
How much did Enact Intelligence raise?
$30 million in a pre-seed round, reported on October 22, 2026. Investors include Yann LeCun, Arthur Mensch and Thomas Wolf, plus several venture firms that were not named.
Who runs Enact Intelligence?
Founder and CEO Manuel Yves Galliker, who previously held engineering roles at Physical Intelligence and 1X Technologies. The company, legally Eta Robotics AG, launched earlier in 2026.
What is Enact building?
AI models that can control many different robot designs, pre-trained from scratch, plus actuators that also act as force and touch sensors, running on FPGA-based compute.