This Robotics Startup Just Raised $4.95M to Fix AI Data Centers

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-04

### The $4.95M Bet on Robot Maintenance AI data centers are growing at breakneck speed, but there's a problem nobody's talking about: the humans who have to keep them running. As these facilities get more powerful and dangerous, the old way of doing maintenance just doesn't cut it anymore. That's where Exclaim Robotics comes in. This Zürich-based startup just came out of stealth mode with a $4.95 million pre-Seed round co-led by Founderful and Playfair. The company's mission? Build autonomous robots that can handle the routine repair and maintenance work inside AI data centers without putting people at risk. ### Why This Matters Right Now You might be wondering why this is such a big deal. Let me break it down. The next generation of AI data centers will distribute power at 800 volts DC directly inside the rack. At that voltage, even opening a rack to replace a failed drive or reseat an optical transceiver carries a serious arc-flash risk. That's not just a minor inconvenience—it's a genuine safety hazard. "The speed of innovation in data centre infrastructure is reminiscent of the space race," said Helen Oleynikova, CEO and Founder of Exclaim Robotics. "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." ### The Brains Behind the Bot Oleynikova isn't new to this game. She 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 also co-created nvblox, a 3D mapping and collision-avoidance library now shipped in NVIDIA Isaac ROS and used by robotics teams worldwide. She's 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 join the company in 2027. ### The Real Problem: Too Many Racks, Too Few Technicians The shift toward automation comes amid a rapid buildout of AI data center capacity that's outpacing the supply of trained technicians. Almost everything in a modern data center is managed remotely—provisioning, scheduling, failover, and networking. But the physical layer is the exception. When hardware fails, someone still has to walk to the rack. The robot Exclaim is building 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. That's no small feat when you consider how dense and cluttered these environments are. ### Starting with the Highest-Volume Tasks The company is starting with the tasks that happen most often: replacing and cleaning optics and SFPs, copper network cabling, and drive replacement. Their approach is to train in simulation first, where a robot can practice a task far more times than is possible on real hardware, then repeat the work on real racks with real sensors until it's reliable enough to trust. "The harder problem is the environment rather than the motion," the startup mentioned. "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." ### What's Next for Exclaim The company plans to use this capital to build its first prototypes, acquire robotics hardware, and grow the engineering team. It's currently hiring robotics and hardware engineers in Zürich. But the long-term vision goes beyond data centers. "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," said Antonia Albert, Principal at Founderful. "Helen and her team from ETH Zürich, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google are the people to solve it." 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. That's a pretty ambitious roadmap, but with this team and this funding, they might just pull it off.