Zurich, Switzerland - Mimic, a Zurich-based robotics company, has raised $16 million in funding to deploy its frontier physical AI across industries, enabling robots to handle complex, dexterous tasks that conventional machines cannot. The new capital will accelerate the development of Mimic’s foundation AI model and humanoid robotic hands, and advance deployments with leading global industry players.
Stephan-Daniel Gravert, co-founder and CPO at Mimic, said, “Humanoids are exciting, but there aren’t many industrial scenarios where the full-body form factor truly adds value. Our approach pairs AI-driven dexterous robotic hands with proven, off-the-shelf robot arms to deliver the same capabilities in a way that is much simpler, more reliable and rapidly deployable.
Mimic 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.
Elvis Nava, co-founder and CTO at Mimic, said, “Our general purpose AI models allow us to automate manual labor in a way that simply was not possible before. Thanks to our unique focus on human-like dexterity and human data, we are competitive at the robot foundation model layer as well as the application layer.”
Mimic’s 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.
Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, Mimic brings together a multidisciplinary team of 25 engineers, researchers, and operators. 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.
Stefan Weirich, co-founder and CEO at Mimic, said, “We’re at an inflection point in robotics where learning-based systems meet real industrial needs. 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.”
