mimic
Assembly Line
AI robotic arm to tackle labour shortages: Swiss startup mimic grabs $2.5M funding
In the race to develop the first commercially available humanoid robot primarily concentrated in the US, mimic has closed a pre-seed round of $2.5 million. The round was led by early-stage Swiss investor Founderful, which invested in Isospec Analytics, together with participation from German-based fund another.vc, UK-based Tiny.vc, which invested in UltiHash, and a lineup of 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 was 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.
As per the company, its solution will enable a robot with humanoid hands to understand and imitate any behaviour, simply by watching a human perform it. This deviates from the conventional robotic solutions and focuses on specific 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. Most use cases are stationary and do not require a full humanoid robot with legs, so they have developed a robotic arm.