A new Swiss startup founded by an ex-Microsoft engineer is looking to develop robots for the data center.

Exclaim Robotics has secured $4.95 million in pre-seed funding to build robots for AI data center maintenance. The new firm is backed by Swiss pre-seed fund Founderful and London-based pre-seed fund Playfair.

The company aims to offer a “remote hands” automation platform that can perform rack-side tasks. It said its mobile autonomous robots will be focused on “dexterous manipulation problems rather than heavy lifting,” with listed tasks including cleaning and replacing optics, reconnecting copper cabling, and re-seating drives precisely.

The robot Exclaim is building will reportedly be able to navigate the data hall on its own, position itself at a rack, and work the front face from the floor to the top rail, without any changes to the building.

Full details haven’t been shared, but a render on the company’s site suggests a pair of robotic arms on a vertical stand attached to a platform with wheels.

Exclaim was founded by Helen Oleynikova. Previously a researcher at Swiss university ETH Zürich, she has also held roles at Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, the latter two focused on robotics.

“I first found out why robots in data centers make sense at Microsoft, through collaboration with an internal team, and after looking across a lot of verticals for where robotics could actually be commercially viable, this is the one I kept coming back to,” Oleynikova said on LinkedIn.

“It’s one of the fastest-evolving industries in physical infrastructure, where increased power densities are running right up against the laws of physics: including switching to 800V DC in the next generation of AI racks. This poses many safety questions, and we think robots are the answer.”

Oleynikova co-created nvblox, the 3D mapping and collision-avoidance library now shipped in Nvidia Isaac ROS.

Playfair said Oleynikova is joined by three founding engineers from Nvidia and ETH – including founding engineer Patrick Pfreundschuh, who holds a PhD from ETH Zürich. Exclaim is now hiring for engineering roles, based in Zurich.

“The next generation of AI data centers runs at 800V DC inside the rack – at that voltage, routine maintenance becomes genuinely hazardous,” Founderful said on LinkedIn. “AI infrastructure is scaling fast, and the physical layer is the one part that hasn’t been automated yet. Exclaim Robotics is the team to do it.”

The funding will help Exclaim build its first prototypes, buy robotics hardware, and grow the engineering team.

“The first year is about proving the beachhead tasks repeatably, without ever damaging anything,” Playfair said. “The key engineering challenges to work on will revolve around autonomy and dexterity. Once the robot is proven to be working, [the] first real-world deployments within data centers will follow.”