Exclaim Robotics Lands $4.95M to Put Robots Inside Live AI Data Center Racks

Exclaim Robotics, a Zurich-based company emerging from stealth today, has raised $4.95 million in funding to deploy robots that perform physical maintenance on live AI data center hardware. The round is backed by European venture firms Founderful and Playfair.

The company is building a manipulator designed to work directly inside server racks while they remain powered on—handling tasks like swapping out fiber optics, re-seating cables, and replacing drives. These are jobs that currently require a human technician to enter the white space, often just centimeters away from 800-volt DC lines. Exclaim’s pitch is that moving this work to a robot eliminates a serious electrical safety risk and unlocks a new class of unattended data centers.

“Routine rack maintenance is the main reason the white space needs to be staffed at all. Move it to a robot and the hall runs unattended,” the company states on its website. The robot is trained on dexterous, precision skills—grasping delicate optics that can bend if forced, seating drives perfectly square—and is designed to reason about its environment autonomously. When confidence in a skill is low, the system asks for remote teleoperation rather than risking a critical incident.

The implications go beyond safety. Removing human comfort constraints means a facility can run hotter, cutting cooling costs. Maintenance can happen when hardware actually needs it, not when a schedule permits, pushing uptime higher. And physical access, always a security surface, shrinks when floor visits are no longer routine. Exclaim also sees the robot as a way to place data centers in locations that are hostile or impractical for people—next to solar farms, at remote energy sources, or even underwater.

The team brings deep robotics experience from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, and ETH Zürich. The new capital will be used to expand the team and continue developing the autonomy stack. While data center servicing is the immediate focus, the company’s vision extends to any hazardous, remote, or hard-to-reach infrastructure.

Exclaim enters a market where AI workloads are driving rapid data center buildout and operators are increasingly looking to automate physical operations. Competitors like Sanctuary AI and others have also explored general-purpose manipulation, but Exclaim’s narrow focus on live-rack servicing at 800V could carve out a defensible niche. The backing from Founderful and Playfair signals investor appetite for hard-tech startups tackling real-world infrastructure problems with a clear near-term commercial path.