ETH spinoff mimic robotics banks $2.5M to develop the first AI-driven collaborative robot

Alongside lead investor Founderful, mimic robotics seed round attracted further venture capital firms such as another.vc from Germany and Tiny.vc from the UK, and an all-star line-up of specialized angel investors. The funds will accelerate the development of its AI-based robotic arm and humanoid hand solution as the team gears towards the official product launch this year.

Founded in 2024 as a spinoff from ETH Zurich, mimic’s researchers Elvis Nava, Stefan Weirich, Stephan-Daniel Gravert and Benedek Forrai are convinced that the latest developments in large-scale generative AI models would upend a multitude of industries, beyond just language and image generation. They developed a foundation model for robotic manipulation, enabling robots to reason and understand the physical world. The downstream effect is that robots can execute tasks with minimal demonstrations and without requiring expensive, complicated programming by engineers for each new task.

Currently, the team is developing a dexterous, human-like robotic hands that fit seamlessly into existing manual labor workflows, driven by state-of-the-art AI models trained directly from human demonstrations. The robot will be able to understand and imitate any behavior, simply by watching a human perform it. This should help address the labor shortages in any industry employing workers in repetitive but hard-to-automate tasks involving complex motor skills.

“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.” says co-founder Stephan-Daniel Gravert. Unlike conventional solutions where robots are only able to complete the narrowly specific task they are designed for, 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,” says co-founder Elvis Nava.

With the global market for Humanoid AI and robotics anticipated to reach $38 billion by 2035, mimic plans to collaborate closely with industry clients to develop solutions for the real world while staying laser-focused on platform-agnostic manipulation and hands rather than building an entire humanoid robot. A wide range of initial customers, from supermarkets, industrial baking and gastronomy to manufacturing, recycling and pharmaceutical lab automation have already approached the startup.

(Press release/RAN)