The round, led by Elaia with participation from Speedinvest, Founderful, 1st Kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures, and the Sequoia Scout Fund, pushes Mimic’s total funding past $20 million. 

The fresh capital will speed up the development of its foundation AI model, humanoid robotic hands, and large-scale industry deployments.

Mimic’s goal is to create robots that can match human finesse in handling intricate tasks on factory floors, from assembling small components to managing logistics processes where precision and adaptability are essential. 

While traditional robots are great at repetitive actions, they lack the flexibility to manage the unpredictable nature of real-world environments.

“Humanoids are exciting, but there aren’t many industrial scenarios where the full-body form factor truly adds value,” said Stephan-Daniel Gravert, co-founder and chief product officer at Mimic Robotics. 

“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.”

The company’s technology is trained on real human performance. Skilled operators wear Mimic’s proprietary data-collection gear during everyday factory work, capturing precise motion data without interrupting production. 

These recordings are then used to teach Mimic’s AI models through imitation learning, allowing robotic hands to replicate human movements with impressive accuracy.

“Our general purpose AI models allow us to automate manual labour in a way that simply was not possible before,” said Elvis Nava, co-founder and chief technology officer. “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.”

Global manufacturers and logistics providers are already testing Mimic’s technology. Pilots are underway with several Fortune 500 companies, including major automotive brands. 

The firm’s offering comes at a time when many industrial economies are faced with labour shortages, an ageing workforce, and high costs that make automation more urgent than ever.

Analysts estimate the humanoid and dexterous robotics market could reach $38 billion by 2035, part of a robotics sector projected to be worth up to $1 trillion by 2040.

Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, Mimic’s 25-member team combines engineering, research, and industrial expertise. The company has also received support from Switzerland’s federal innovation agency and was selected for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator programme.

“We’re at an inflection point in robotics where learning-based systems meet real industrial needs,” said Stefan Weirich, co-founder and CEO of Mimic Robotics. “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.”

Investors have commended Mimic’s technical and commercial potential. Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner at Elaia, noted, “Elaia is thrilled to lead the seed round in Mimic. 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.”

Vincent Faber, investment manager at Elaia, added, “This enables autonomous, versatile manipulation and unlocks a previously untapped segment of the automation market, where the demand for flexible solutions continues to grow.”

Meanwhile, Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, general partner at Speedinvest, said, “At Speedinvest, we’ve always believed that Europe’s strength lies in marrying world-class engineering with foundational research. 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.”

The startup’s debut product, Chipmind Agents, is aimed at automating the repetitive, low-level work that ties up engineering teams and drags out design cycles.

Chipmind describes its agents as a new class of tools that work from a customer’s own, proprietary design data.

The agents are built to slot into existing engineering flows, learn a company’s toolchain and design hierarchy, and then carry out multi-step design and verification tasks autonomously, all while leaving final control with the human engineer. The company claims engineers can save roughly 40% of their time on routine chores.

The problem Chipmind targets is familiar to anyone who has worked in chip design: massive, customised EDA flows that simply were not built to talk to modern automation. Chipmind’s founders say they didn’t try to rip out those legacy systems.

Instead, they built a platform that prepares them for agentic automation and wraps intelligence around the existing stack.

“In the semiconductor industry, deep customisation and data protection are fundamental, but true design awareness is what separates a generic tool from an intelligent partner. Each company’s chip is a complex hierarchy with unique constraints, surrounded by a proprietary environment of tools and workflows,” said Harald Kröll, co-founder and CEO of Chipmind. 

“That is the reality we built for. Our ‘design-aware’ agents are engineered to holistically understand the entire chip context, not just the surrounding tools. We’ve found this deep awareness is the key that unlocks productivity, translating directly into significant time savings on the most complex tasks, all while integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.”

The startup’s origin is rooted in academic and industry experience. Co-founders Harald Kröll and Sandro Belfanti met at ETH Zurich during their PhDs and together have been involved in the development of more than 20 chips, from mobile modems to system-on-chip designs. Their experience, they say, exposed how much of chip engineering is precise but repetitive work.

“Anyone who’s spent time in chip development knows how much of the work is repetitive and time-consuming, demanding precision but not necessarily creativity,” said Sandro Belfanti, Co-Founder and CTO of Chipmind. 

“Throughout my career developing chips at top-tier semiconductor companies, I’ve often wished for a solution that could magically take care of those tedious tasks so I could focus on solving real engineering challenges.

“With Chipmind Agents, we’re finally bringing that solution to life: AI agents that can autonomously handle the boring parts, letting engineers focus on what truly matters: innovation.”

Chipmind’s first funding round was led by Founderful, with several semiconductor industry angels joining the table. The founders say the money will go to hiring engineers, speeding up product work and deepening relationships with strategic customers.

The launch arrives as chip design grows continually harder, demand for compute rises, design complexity increases, and simply adding headcount is not a realistic fix. Chipmind places itself as a practical bridge, a way to keep existing toolchains while automating the parts of the process that slow teams down.

Edouard Treccani, principal at Founderful, added: “In a world buzzing with AI every day, Chipmind stands out as a refreshingly real solution to a problem Harald and Sandro have spent 20 years deep in. From day one, they’ve built in close dialogue with the market, and the early feedback has been remarkably positive. Founderful is thrilled to be part of their journey!”

Chipmind is offering demos to semiconductor groups interested in testing its agents and says it will continue scaling its engineering team as it works with early customers.