The wire — 23 October 2026

Three rounds from October 22 reach the desk Thursday. They share no single market — physical AI, OT cybersecurity, browser automation — but one structural logic: each is the infrastructure layer an AI system needs to act in the world, built for a paradigm the existing tooling was not designed to serve.

Enact Intelligence (Zürich, €26.68M Pre-Seed) exits stealth with a thesis against the dominant direction in physical AI: vision data alone is insufficient for industrial dexterity. The company captures force data from robot actuators — the signal that tells a gripper how hard it is holding an object — and builds from that proprioceptive foundation rather than camera feeds. The round draws redalpine, Notion Capital, and firstminute capital as institutional backers; the angels include Arthur Mensch (Mistral) and Yann LeCun (AMI Labs), both public advocates of the missing-sensorimotor-data argument. Founded March 2026 by Manuel Yves Galliker, previously of 1X and Physical Intelligence, with a 12-person team from DeepMind, Amazon Robotics, Helsing and ETH Zürich.

Indurex (Amsterdam, €7 million, Contrarian Ventures lead) builds Engineering Intelligence: an AI layer that ingests cybersecurity alerts, process safety data, and engineering signals from industrial control systems simultaneously — so that a network intrusion event arrives with physical plant context attached, not as an isolated alert to investigate hours later. Co-founded by Jalal Bouhdada (CEO), a serial OT security founder who has sold into these procurement processes before. Targets oil & gas, energy, utilities and manufacturing under NIS2, IEC 62443, and NERC CIP. Axeleo Capital and Dutch VC Curiosity also participated.

Reduck (Paris, $3 million / ~€2.7M Pre-Seed, Daphni lead) equips AI agents with a library of 1,200+ ready-to-run browser automation scripts across 250+ websites, claiming a threefold reduction in cost and failure rate versus unguided navigation. Founded by Daniel Huynh (LaVague, Mithril Security / H Company alumni), Louis Abraham, and Raphaël Millet. Drysdale Ventures and Galion.exe also participated. The round funds team growth and a developer offering for portals — insurance, healthcare, legacy CRMs — that will never publish an MCP server.

Next edition: Friday 24 October 2026.