With global labour shortages and reshoring efforts on the rise, industries like manufacturing and logistics are increasingly in need of robots that can tackle complex manual tasks previously done by humans. Mimic Robotics’ physical AI, combined with off-the-shelf robotic arms, offers a scalable solution capable of handling delicate and precise operations.
Today, the startup has raised $16 million in funding led by Elaia, alongside Speedinvest, to deploy its frontier physical AI across industries, enabling robots to handle complex, dexterous tasks that conventional machines cannot.
This round also included participation from Founderful, 1st kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures, and Sequoia Scout Fund, bringing mimic’s total funding to over $20 million.
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.
Making human-level dexterity broadly accessible for industrial automation
Mimic was founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab. The founding team includes Elvis Nava (CTO), Stefan Weirich (CEO), Stephan-Daniel Gravert (CPO), and Benedek Forrai (Founding Engineer), all researchers who had been working at the intersection of AI and robotics under the guidance of Professor Robert Katzschmann, who also serves as the company’s Scientific Advisor.
Its approach centres on training physical AI models with real-world human demonstrations captured via proprietary data-collection devices worn by operators on factory floors.
Stephan-Daniel Gravert, co-founder at mimic, told TFN, “mimic closes this automation gap by building frontier physical AI models trained on real-world human demonstrations. Skilled operators wear mimic’s proprietary devices while performing their regular work on factory floors, capturing detailed motion data without disrupting production. This data trains AI models via imitation learning, enabling mimic’s robotic hands to reproduce human technique and adapt autonomously, reacting to object changes, handling disturbances, and self-correcting in environments built for humans.”
Unlike traditional industrial robots limited to repetitive tasks, mimic’s AI-powered humanoid robotic hands can autonomously adapt, react to disturbances, and operate seamlessly alongside humans. Their focus on scalability, ease of deployment, and safety differentiates them from competitors investing mainly in full humanoid robots, such as Tesla, Agility Robotics, and Figure AI, which face regulatory and cost barriers and have limited real-world adoption.
What’s next?
Gravert concluded, “mimic’s long-term vision is to make human-level dexterity accessible across industries. By combining advanced AI, scalable hardware, and a unique solution to the data problem in robotics, the company is building a foundation for the next generation of intelligent automation – robots that can finally do what people do, at the scale industry demands.”
Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner at Elaia, said, “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.”
Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, General Partner at Speedinvest, added, “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”
