Swiss robotics startup Enact Intelligence raises $30M pre-seed round

Enact, officially Eta Robotics AG, was launched earlier this year by CEO Manuel Yves Galliker. Galliker earlier held engineering roles at robotics startups Physical Intelligence Inc. and 1X Technologies AS. The Enact team also includes former employees of Google DeepMind, Amazon.com Inc. and other major industry players.

Enact is developing AI models optimized to control robots. Such algorithms were historically tailored to specific robot form factors, so a model built to power a humanoid robot may not be capable of reliably operating a standalone robotic arm. Enact’s algorithms are designed to support a wide range of robot designs.

Early-stage startups often use customized versions of open-source models to power their software. A recent job posting indicates that Enact is pursuing a different approach: the company is hiring an AI researcher with expertise in pre-training, a term for developing AI models from scratch. That task can be significantly more difficult than customizing open-source models.

Enact says it is developing AI models and physical robot components, especially actuators. Those are mechanical subsystems that act as a robot’s muscles. An actuator combines an electric motor with a chip that controls its motion and certain other auxiliary parts.

Enact’s actuators produce kinetic energy and also act as sensors. The company says they “sense force and touch,” indicating that they measure pressure a robot applies to objects when it picks them up.

Enact did not specify how the technology works. However, earlier attempts to build actuator-based sensors may offer clues. Google LLC and publicly traded chipmaker Allegro MicroSystems Inc. are among the companies that have invested in such projects. Both companies used an approach called Back EMF to turn actuators into pressure sensors.

Running a current through an actuator causes its built-in motor to spin. The rotation of that motor generates a second current that flows back into the actuator. Back EMF technologies measure that second current, or counter-electromotive force, to understand what the host system is doing.

If a robotic arm’s actuator is active but not generating any counter-electromotive force, engineers can deduce that the arm is holding a heavy item its actuator is unable to move. By contrast, a strong counter-electromotive force indicates that the actuator is spinning freely, which often means the robot arm is not holding anything. Back EMF sensors can also collect data about a range of other robot activities.

A job posting indicates that Enact plans to use field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, to power its robots. An FPGA is a chip that users can customize more extensively than a central processing unit or a graphics card, making it possible to achieve better performance and power efficiency.

Enact will reportedly use its funding round to hire more engineers and enhance its technology.