Zurich-based Mimic Robotics has raised a $16m seed round led by Elaia and Speedinvest, with participation from Founderful, 1st Kind, 10X Founders, 2100 and Sequoia Scout.
Funding for European robotics startups is booming, with overall investment this year set to eclipse the €761m raised across the sector in 2024, according to Sifted data.
Swiss startup Mimic was spun out of ETH Zurich in 2024, and is making humanoid robotic hands which will be used for a variety of tasks across manufacturing and logistics. It’s also developing a general purpose AI model for robotics.
Labour markets across industrial economies are under pressure. In Germany manufacturing faces a projected shortage of 5m workers by 2030, putting $630 billion in output at risk. Ageing workforces, rising production costs and efforts to reduce dependence on global supply chains are driving a shift towards reshoring and automation that can match human dexterity.
Mimic’s robotic hands resemble the human form but aren’t reliant on a full humanoid body to carry out tasks. It buys off the shelf robotic arms to fit its hands with.
It’s currently working on a number of pilot projects with big European manufacturing and automotive companies which are testing its tech on assembly lines and packaging. It’s also testing packaging and sorting with logistics and retail customers.
These are good use cases to hit as they’re problems industry needs today, says Elvis Nava, one of Mimic’s cofounders, and its CTO. “All these things are done by humans today, and it’s not possible to automate, that’s where our plug and play solution comes in.”
Developing a general purpose robotics model
Alongside pilot programmes, Mimic is also developing a foundation model trained on large-scale data recordings of humans performing live manual labour tasks while wearing the company’s data collection devices. These demonstrations are used to train its model via imitation learning, enabling Mimic’s humanoid robotic hands to reproduce human movements.
A lack of huge robotics datasets is something that has held the industry back, and the big challenge for Mimic is to gather enough of it to train its model to a level where it can be deployed at scale in real factory settings.
One of the “main technical milestones” for the company, Nava says, is to go from validating its tech in a lab to building productised robot hands which can perform customer tasks at scale.
“We have gone through lots of iterations for the best use case for customer pilots,” he says. “Because our tech is general purpose in the beginning it did not make sense to constrain the market from the first day.”
Once it moves beyond pilot programmes Mimic will have two pricing models. It will offer a robot-as-a-service subscription to clients, which lowers the cost of adoption and allows it to show customers operational savings from month one, says Stefan Weirich, one of Mimic’s other cofounders, and its CEO.
Some customers at a certain scale don’t like operational expenses, he adds, so Mimic will also sell them the robot station outright and charge an ongoing service level agreement and software subscription.
With the fresh funding it wants to continue investing in product development and improving its AI model alongside scaling data collection with factory partners.
