The race to develop the first commercially available humanoid robot has been primarily concentrated in the US, until now. However, Mimic, a Switzerland-based startup, is challenging US dominance and joining the robotics race to be the first to take a robotic arm and humanoid hand combination to market using generative AI, as it raises a pre-seed round of €2.3 million.
The investment round is led by early stage Swiss investor Founderful, together with participation from German-based fund another.vc, UK-based Tiny.vc and an all-star lineup of specialised angel investors. Spinning out from the research university ETH Zurich, Mimic was founded by researchers Elvis Nava, Stefan Weirich, Stephan-Daniel Gravert and Benedek Forrai in 2024. The founding team were working at the intersection of robotics and AI under Professor Robert Katzschmann’s Soft Robotic Labs when they became increasingly convinced that the latest developments in large scale generative AI models would upend a multitude of industries, beyond just language and image generation. The team set out to develop a foundation model for robotic manipulation and quickly realised how much value their idea held to revolutionise the way robotics fit into our everyday lives and economy.
Today, global labour shortages are rocking businesses across multiple sectors and employers are struggling to find, hire and retain workers. Against the backdrop of a pronounced shift in work preferences, like reduced hours and enhanced flexibility to work from home, lab or shortages are especially severe in the case of menial, repetitive, and demanding manual tasks. Mimic plans to ease these shortages with dexterous, human-like robotic hands that fit seamlessly into existing manual labour workflows, driven by state-of-the-art AI models trained directly from human demonstrations.
“Most use cases are stationary and do not require a full humanoid robot with legs. That’s why we focus data-collection and hardware ingenuity on a universal robotic hand that is compatible with off-the-shelf industrial robotic arms for positioning,” said co-founder Stephan-Daniel Gravert.
This solution will enable a robot with humanoid hands to understand and imitate any behaviour, simply by watching a human perform it. This marks a departure from conventional robotic solutions, which focus on being purpose-built for narrow use cases. Since each use case requires expensive ad-hoc engineering and comprehensive pre-programmed movements, robots are only able to complete the narrowly specific task they are designed for. In contrast, Mimic is developing robots with a unified, general purpose approach to achieve a variety of tasks with a single robot design. “We designed our robot to mimic a human hand so it fits in our world, instead of re-designing the world to fit with our robot,” added co-founder Elvis Nava.
