Elvis Nava
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News

  • December 2025: We published “mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAs”, a new class of Video-Action Model that replaces the VLM backbone of traditional VLAs with a video model, allowing us to leverage pure video pre-training for robot learning.

  • December 2025: I successfully defended my PhD at ETH Zurich. I thank all my friends and collaborators at the ETH AI Center, the Institute of Neuroinformatics and the Soft Robotics Lab.

  • November 2025: I was interviewed by Enrico Pagliarini for Radio24’s “2024” program, where I talked about mimic and its approach towards general purpose automation.

  • November 2025: I was interviewed by Melanie Gabriel and Christian Woese for their Follow the Gradient Podcast on the topics of mimic’s $16M fundraise, university research spinouts and European attitudes towards risk and technology.

  • November 2025: mimic raised a $16M seed round from Elaia, Speedinvest, Founderful, 1st Kind, 10x Founders, 2100 Ventures, Sequoia Scout Fund and angel investors. Our fundraising round was featured in Forbes and Sifted (1, 2).

  • October 2025: I was named one of the “14 robotics operators to watch in Europe” according to Sifted.

  • June 2025: We published a paper I supervised, “Latent Action Diffusion for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation”, introducing a new method for cross-embodied robot learning with latent diffusion.

  • June 2025: We published “mimic-one: a Scalable Model Recipe for General Purpose Robot Dexterity”, outlining the practical foundations of our approach towards general purpose dexterity at mimic.

  • May 2025: mimic organized a Robotics Hackathon in Zurich in collaboration with OpenAI, Loki Robotics, Zurich Builds, Prime Intellect and General Catalyst.

  • April 2025: I was interviewed by Arnie Ramesh for his Ambitious x Driven Podcast, where I talked about mimic and my own origin story.

  • May 2024: Me and my co-founders announced our startup mimic. We raised $2.5M in our pre-seed equity round from Founderful, another.vc, Tiny VC and angel investors. Our fundraising round was featured in Forbes and Sifted.

  • January 2024: A paper I collaborated on, “Vision-Language Models are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Reinforcement Learning” was accepted to ICLR 2024.

  • August 2023: My first-author paper “Meta-Learning via Classifier(-free) Diffusion Guidance” was accepted to Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

  • March 2023: I was featured on SRF, Switzerland’s National TV Broadcaster, in a short segment about AI and robotics for SRF Kids.

  • December 2022: ETH Zurich’s press office interviewed me about multi-modal machine learning and robotics.

  • June 2022: A paper I collaborated on, “Sim2Real for Soft Robotic Fish via Differentiable Simulation”, was accepted to IROS 2022.

  • May 2022: My first-author paper “Fast Aquatic Swimmer Optimization with Differentiable Projective Dynamics and Neural Network Hydrodynamic Models” was accepted to ICML 2022.

  • January 2022: My Master’s Thesis paper, “Diversified Sampling for Batched Bayesian Optimization with Determinantal Point Processes”, was accepted to AISTATS 2022.

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