Zurich-based Exclaim Robotics has emerged from stealth with $4.95 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI-powered robots for automating data centre maintenance. The round was co-led by Playfair Capital and Founderful. The company was founded by Helen Oleynikova, previously at Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Willow Garage, and ETH Zürich, where she co-created nvblox, a 3D mapping and collision avoidance tool now built into Nvidia’s Isaac ROS. Oleynikova left ETH Zürich in January 2026 to build the company full-time, joined by founding engineer Patrick Pfreundschuh. Two additional founding engineers are set to join in 2027.
The robot is designed to navigate a data hall autonomously, locate a rack, and work the front face from floor to top rail without any modifications to the building itself. The initial task set is narrow but operationally significant, covering cleaning and replacement of fiber-optic connectors, small form-factor pluggable network transceivers, copper cabling, and failed drives. The company’s stated differentiator is hands-on repair inside a live 800-volt rack, a more physically involved profile than the inspection and logistics focus of most peers. Comparable competitors include Y Combinator-backed Boost Robotics, which builds repair robots for data centres, Watney Robotics, which is developing internal facility logistics and maintenance autonomy, and Gecko Robotics, which is further along in broader industrial inspection.
The startup is targeting a rapidly expanding market. The global data centre robotics segment was valued at approximately $13.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $44.2 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 21.6 percent, according to Research and Markets. The growth curve is tied directly to the buildout of AI compute infrastructure, which is driving both larger facility footprints and higher maintenance complexity as denser server configurations and specialized networking hardware raise the operational burden on hyperscale operators. Playfair Capital has previously backed robotics startups including Zurich-based autonomous security patrol company Ascento.
Data centre maintenance is an area where automation faces a distinctive set of constraints. Operators cannot easily take live racks offline for extended maintenance windows, and physical intervention around high-density power and networking equipment raises safety and liability concerns. A robot capable of performing routine hands-on tasks in live environments, if reliable at scale, could reduce operational costs and improve response times for issues that currently require dispatched technicians. Whether Exclaim’s platform can meet the reliability, safety, and integration bar required by hyperscale customers will determine how quickly the company can move from initial demonstrations into recurring commercial deployments. The funding round marks the company’s entry into a small but rapidly forming subcategory of infrastructure-focused robotics startups.
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