Zurich start-up Exclaim Robotics emerges with robots that service live AI data-centre racks

Almost every humanoid pitch of the last two years has aimed at factories, warehouses or homes. Exclaim Robotics, a Zurich company that emerged publicly in the first days of August 2026, picked a target that is growing faster than any of them and is almost never discussed: the inside of an AI data centre. The company's own site describes the product as "autonomous optics, cabling, and drive replacement on live 800V racks", with the goal of lights-out operation — a facility that keeps running without technicians walking the aisles. The stated design principle is autonomy-first with a human fallback: when the robot's confidence drops, it calls a remote operator rather than guessing. The site names Founderful and Playfair as investors and describes a team drawn from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google and ETH Zürich. The funding figure comes from elsewhere. Swiss and European start-up press reported a pre-seed round of 4.95 million USD (about 4.29 million EUR) co-led by Founderful and Playfair, with the money going to first prototypes, hardware and engineering hires; the company's own pages carry no dated announcement and no amount, so we treat the number as press reporting. Reports also name Helen Oleynikova — fifteen years of robotics across Willow Garage, Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA, an ETH Zürich doctorate, and co-author of the nvblox mapping library in NVIDIA's Isaac ROS — as founder and CEO, with Patrick Pfreundschuh, from the ETH team that won the DARPA SubT challenge, as co-founder. The date of the announcement is itself inconsistent across outlets, given as either 4 or 5 August 2026. The thesis is worth noting even before the hardware exists. Capital is pouring into AI compute — SpaceX alone reported 15.8 billion USD of AI capital expenditure in a single quarter — and every one of those racks needs hands to replace a failed transceiver or drive. Robots that work at 800 V beside running equipment are a narrow, unglamorous and very large market. wujec.ai has no profile for the company yet; there is no product to catalogue until the first machine is shown, and we are not illustrating this item, because the graphics on the company's site carry no licence information.