Mimic Robotics Raises $16M to Deploy Physical AI for Dexterous Manufacturing
Mimic, a Zurich-based robotics company, has recently raised $16 million in funding led to deploy its frontier physical AI across industries, enabling robots to handle complex, dexterous tasks that conventional machines cannot. This oversubscribed seed brings 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.
On factory floors around the world, millions of intricate manual tasks still depend on human skill. These tasks remain out of reach for traditional automation across industries including manufacturing, assembly and logistics. With labour shortages growing and industries reshoring production amid global uncertainty, the need for versatile and intelligent robots has never been clearer. Traditional robots excel at repetitive, pre-programmed motions in controlled environments, but require costly setup and custom coding for each task. At the same time, the race to build humanoid robots has drawn billions in investment, led largely by companies in the US and China, but adoption remains very limited. Safety and regulatory concerns, high costs and limited dexterity have all slowed real-world deployment.
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.
“Our general purpose AI models allow us to automate manual labour in a way that simply was not possible before,” says Elvis Nava, co-founder and CTO at Mimic. “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.”
Labour markets across industrial economies are under sustained pressure. Aging workforces, rising production costs and efforts to reduce dependence on global supply chains are driving a shift towards reshoring and automation. Analysts project the global humanoid and dexterous robotics market alone could reach $38 billion by 2035, within a broader robotics market estimated between $200 billion and $1 trillion by 2040.
“We’re at an inflection point in robotics where learning-based systems meet real industrial needs,” says Stefan Weirich, co-founder and CEO at Mimic. “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.”
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 labour-intensive sectors.
For more information: www.mimicrobotics.com
