Robots that rely on cameras to handle objects run into a wall when the light is wrong or the object is soft. A Swiss startup is betting force sensing is the missing sense.
Enact Intelligence emerged from stealth with a $30M pre-seed, unusually large for the stage. Redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital led the institutional side, with angels including Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch and Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf.
Feeling through the actuators
The company builds the underlying technology for general purpose robots rather than a single machine. Its approach reads force and touch through the actuators themselves, so a robot feels what is happening as it happens instead of inferring it from images, and learns with less data.
Chief executive Manuel Yves Galliker previously worked at Physical Intelligence, and describes rebuilding the stack from model architecture down to the sensors feeding it, with an emphasis on reliability and operation across different form factors.
The money goes to hiring and to hardware and research work. The target is industrial settings first, where manipulation tasks repeat but vary enough that pre-programmed motion falls short.
Tactile sensing has become a crowded research front, with several labs arguing that vision alone cannot deliver dexterity at production reliability.
