Mimic Robotics banks $16 million seed funding

Traditional robots excel at repetitive, pre-programmed motions in controlled environments, however they require costly setup and custom coding for each task. At the same time, the race to build humanoid robots has drawn billions in investment, led largely by companies in the US and China, but adoption remains very limited. Safety and regulatory concerns, high costs and limited dexterity have all slowed real-world deployment.

Mimic Robotics builds frontier physical AI models trained on real-world human demonstrations, using innovative methods to overcome the data scarcity problem in robotics. Skilled operators wear mimic’s proprietary data collection devices while performing their daily work on factory floors, capturing detailed movement data from live production settings without disrupting operations. These demonstrations are then used to train AI models via imitation learning, enabling mimic’s humanoid robotic hands to reliably reproduce human technique. The company’s physical AI models ensure that robots autonomously react to changing positions and orientations of objects, handle disturbances and self-correct their actions, seamlessly operating in environments designed for humans.

This technology is already being piloted with top-tier manufacturers, including Fortune 500 companies and global automotive brands. Mimic is also partnering with leading multinational logistics providers and seeing strong customer demand across many other labor-intensive sectors.

“We’re at an inflection point in robotics where learning-based systems meet real industrial Needs,” says Stefan Weirich, co-founder and CEO at mimic. “We make dexterity deployable at scale, closing the gap between what AI can do in the lab and what factories actually need. Europe has the talent, the infrastructure, and the demand, and we’re building the company that brings all of this together.”

Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, mimic brings together a multidisciplinary team of 25 employees.  Over the past year, the company has secured non-dilutive funding from Switzerland’s federal innovation agency and was selected for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program supporting early-stage companies applying advanced AI to real-world challenges. 

The latest funding round, a heavily oversubscribed seed round, was led by Elaia, a European full stack tech and deep tech investor, alongside Speedinvest, a leading early-stage venture capital firm with more than €1 billion Assets under Management. The round also saw participation from Founderful, 1st kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures and Sequoia Scout Fund, bringing mimic’s total funding to over $20 million. The proceeds will be used to accelerate the development of mimic’s foundation AI model and humanoid robotic hands, and advance deployments with leading global industry players.

“Elaia is thrilled to lead the seed round in mimic. The world-class team at mimic is addressing one of the most challenging problems in physical AI: dexterous manipulation. Mimic’s breakthrough approach integrates a proprietary robotic hand, state-of-the-art foundation models for robotics, and novel data acquisition and training methods”, said Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner at Elaia.”

Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, General Partner at Speedinvest, says: “At Speedinvest, we’ve always believed that Europe’s strength lies in marrying world-class engineering with foundational research. With mimic, we see exactly that: a platform that unlocks human-level dexterity with frontier AI and solves billion-dollar problems on factory floors today. This is the moment Europe steps forward to compete and lead in the new era of AI and robotics.”

(Press release)