Sequoia-Backed Mimic Robotics Secures $16M To Automate Tough Factory Tasks With Human-Like AI Dexterity

Physical AI robotics company Mimic announced on Monday that it closed a $16 million seed funding round led by Elaia with participation from Speedinvest. The oversubscribed round also drew investment from Founderful, 1st kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures and Sequoia Scout Fund, pushing total capital raised past $20 million.

The fresh capital will fund expansion of the startup’s AI foundation model and accelerate commercial rollouts with Fortune 500 firms and automotive manufacturers, Mimic said.

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Mimic Robotics Targets High-Precision Tasks That Conventional Robots Miss

Many factory tasks worldwide still depend on human skill because standard robots struggle to manage unpredictable, fine movements. According to Mimic, traditional automation performs efficiently in structured settings, yet it requires costly reprogramming each time a process changes.

At the same time, heavy investment has gone toward developing full-body humanoid robots in the U.S. and China, but adoption has lagged. Regulatory barriers, safety issues, limited dexterity, and high costs continue to slow real-world use, the company said.

"Humanoids are exciting, but there aren't many industrial scenarios where the full-body form factor truly adds value," Mimic co-founder and Chief Product Officer Stephan-Daniel Gravert said in the company's statement. "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."

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Mimic Trains Robots By Watching Factory Workers

Zurich-based Mimic gathers real-world factory data to train what it calls physical AI models, addressing the lack of high-quality movement data that has slowed robotics research.

According to the company, operators wear Mimic's proprietary motion-capture gear while performing their usual tasks, allowing the system to record detailed hand and arm movements without interrupting production.

Those demonstrations are then used for imitation learning, teaching the company's AI-driven robotic hands to reproduce the same precision and technique seen in skilled human workers. The trained models help robots respond to changes in object positions, adapt to disruptions, and self-correct in real time while operating in spaces originally designed for people, Mimic said.

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"Our general purpose AI models allow us to automate manual labour in a way that simply was not possible before," Mimic co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Elvis Nava said in the company's statement. "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."

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$38 Billion Market Opportunity As Labor Shortages Intensify

Global labor markets are under increasing pressure as manufacturing costs climb, workforces age, and firms move production closer to home.

According to Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), the combined humanoid and dexterous robotics segment could reach $38 billion by 2035. Meanwhile, UBS projects the broader robotics market could expand to between $200 billion and $1 trillion by 2040.

Mimic said that besides Fortune 500 manufacturers and leading automotive companies, its technology is already being tested with multinational logistics providers, with additional demand emerging across a range of labor-intensive industries.

Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the company has assembled a team of 25 engineers, researchers, and operators. Over the past year, Mimic said it received non-dilutive funding from Switzerland's federal innovation agency and joined the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program supporting early-stage companies applying advanced AI to real-world challenges.

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This article Sequoia-Backed Mimic Robotics Secures $16M To Automate Tough Factory Tasks With Human-Like AI Dexterity originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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