Swiss robotics startup Enact Intelligence has today emerged out of stealth, with a $30m pre-seed round and backing from two heavyweights from the French AI ecosystem, Mistral boss Arthur Mensch and Meta's former AI chief scientist Yann LeCun.

The $30m funding is high for a pre-seed funding round and comes as investors continue to invest heavily in robotics. Enact is building the underlying technology for general purpose robots.

It says it’s developing tech that enables robots to manipulate objects with greater accuracy by sensing force and touch, as it looks to make robots carry out work in industrial settings and in the real world.

Its approach is different to those robotics companies which rely on cameras and visuals.

Manuel Yves Galliker, its CEO and co-founder, who previously worked at the hot 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."

Investors in the round include Redalpine, Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital, with angel investors including Mensch, LeCun and Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf.

The startup is using the funds to expand the team and accelerate its hardware and R&D development.

The CEO added: “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.”