Exclaim Robotics, a Zürich-based startup building robots to maintain AI data centres, has exited stealth mode with a €4.29 million ($4.95 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Founderful and Playfair.
The company is building autonomous mobile robots that perform routine repair and maintenance work inside AI data centres.
“The speed of innovation in data centre infrastructure is reminiscent of the space race: power density is pushing the whole industry to the edge of the laws of physics. Liquid cooling, 800V DC across the whole facility, possibly superconducting bus bars cooled with liquid nitrogen. Maintaining that by hand gets more dangerous every year, and that’s the part robots should take,” said Helen Oleynikova, CEO and Founder of Exclaim Robotics.
Founded in 2026 by Oleynikova, who spent 15 years working in robotics across Willow Garage, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and ETH Zürich, and holds a PhD from ETH Zürich in mapping and planning for cluttered, unstructured environments. She co-created nvblox, the 3D mapping and collision-avoidance library now shipped in NVIDIA Isaac ROS and used by robotics teams worldwide.
She is joined by founding engineer Patrick Pfreundschuh, who holds a PhD from ETH Zürich, created the BIEVR-LIO LiDAR-inertial odometry system, and was part of the winning team at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Two more founding engineers will be joining the company in 2027.
The company states that the next generation of AI data centres will distribute power at 800 volts DC directly inside the rack. At that voltage, opening a rack carries arc-flash risk, and ordinary maintenance, such as replacing a failed drive or reseating an optical transceiver, becomes hazardous work.
The shift comes amid a rapid buildout of AI data centre capacity, which is outpacing the supply of trained technicians, says Exclaim Robotics.
Almost everything in a modern data centre is managed remotely: provisioning, scheduling, failover, and networking. The physical layer is the exception. When hardware fails, someone still has to walk to the rack.
The robot being built by Exclaim has 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.
The company is starting with the highest-volume break-fix tasks, which are replacing and cleaning optics and SFPs, copper network cabling, and drive replacement.
Exclaim notes that its approach is to train in simulation first, where a robot can practise a task far more times than is possible on real hardware, and then repeat the work on real racks with real sensors until it is reliable enough to trust.
“The harder problem is the environment rather than the motion: racks are dense with cabling, and a robot has to understand what it is looking at before it can safely touch anything. Where its confidence in a task is low, it will hand off to a remote operator rather than attempt it,” the startup mentioned.
“AI data centres are scaling faster than anyone can staff or safely maintain them, and the 800V transition will change everything about how that infrastructure gets run. Helen and her team from ETH Zürich, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google are the people to solve it. We backed Exclaim because Helen is exactly the founder you want when a hard problem becomes urgent,” said Antonia Albert, Principal at Founderful.
The company plans to use this capital to build its first prototypes, acquire robotics hardware, and grow the engineering team. It is currently hiring robotics and hardware engineers in Zürich.
Exclaim’s longer-term goal is to apply the same capability wherever infrastructure maintenance is hazardous, remote, or hard to reach, with high-voltage and energy infrastructure as the next target.