According to a report by Marina Temkin on TechCrunch, Enigma, a research lab less than a year old that is emerging from stealth on Monday, has raised a $70 million seed funding round. The round was led by venture capital firms Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. The company proposes a fundamentally different approach to developing AI-powered robotics and is launching a large-scale public experiment that allows anyone in the world to interact online with more than 100 proprietary AI robots it has developed.
Enigma’s Approach vs. AI Trends in Robotics
According to the report, multiple robotics companies are currently tackling one of AI’s most complex problems: building foundation models capable of executing diverse tasks they were not explicitly trained on beforehand. The approaches taken by various industry players span a wide range of methods—from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data directly from humans performing physical tasks while wearing specialized gloves with built-in sensors.
In contrast, Enigma, founded less than a year ago, is taking a fundamentally different approach. Instead of focusing solely on technical model capabilities, the startup wants to study how humans interact and communicate with robots. The company hopes that a deep exploration of these interactions and dynamics will lead to the development of intuitive interfaces, and perhaps even a new and different kind of robotic brain.
The Mass Experiment: Robots Painting and Sword Fighting in Israel and California
To practically test how humans want and prefer to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that allows anyone in the world to connect online and interact with more than 100 of the company’s proprietary AI robots. Housed in dedicated hangars located in Israel and California, these robots are capable of performing various physical tasks.
Among the tasks that can be triggered and observed as part of the experiment are painting pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemistry experiments in which the robots pick up and mix laboratory flasks containing different liquids. Enigma claims that it has developed both the physical robotic arms and their underlying AI models entirely from the ground up, without relying on existing third-party systems.
Founders' Background: From Teenage Hacking and Unit 8200 to Robotics
The company was founded by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv. Jacobi was formerly Microsoft's youngest-ever employee, recruited there by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his tenure at the company. Jacobi and Niv first met and became close friends while competing against each other in hacking competitions as young teenagers. Later, they served together in the IDF's elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.
When Jacobi and Niv decided to launch a startup together last year, they chose to apply their technical skills and knowledge to AI for robotics. Although it was a field in which both lacked direct prior experience, they believed it held some of the most fascinating and important unsolved problems in the technology world. To build the product, they assembled a team that, according to Jacobi, consists of some of their smartest friends from Israel's tech ecosystem and community—including alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and several individuals who were even convinced to drop out of PhD programs to join the venture.
The Investors' Perspective: The Advantage of Coming from Outside the Industry
"There are a lot of robotics industry insiders participating in the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders—they're not roboticists. It affords them more room for originality," explained Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, which led the startup's funding round. Shah added and compared their approach to traditional industry methodologies: "Someone who's an insider may start with the capability of teleoperation or dexterity, but Enigma is starting from a very different place: 'What's the ultimate experience?'"
An Interface as Simple as a Car's Volume Knob
Speaking with TechCrunch, Jacobi shared that Enigma’s main goal is to make human-robot interaction completely effortless. In his words, "If you had to do your dishes and spent 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put everything, everyone reaches the point of 'Forget it, I'll just do it myself.'" Jacobi claims that "Right now, everyone is at that point—even with the most capable models."
Jacobi believes that operating and controlling robots should eventually become as intuitive and simple as turning a car's volume knob. He argues that users would be highly frustrated if, instead of turning a simple physical dial, they had to adjust the car's volume by setting specific percentages without knowing in advance whether the final result would end up too loud or too quiet. Enigma hopes that the data gathered from its public online experiment will help them uncover a new interface that becomes the robotics equivalent of that simple, familiar volume knob.
Open Questions and First Business Partnerships
The public test launched by the startup is designed to evaluate various and diverse ways in which people want and prefer to communicate with robots. "We're going to learn a lot about what is the right way to interact with robots," Jacobi said in an interview. "Do we want to just talk to them over text or audio? Do we want to show them an example as a video? Or maybe do we want to tap, drag, and drop?"
Jacobi openly admits that Enigma's experiment is highly open-ended. The company's hope is that by gathering real-world data on human-robot interaction, the startup will discover not only superior and more user-friendly interfaces, but also better ways to train its foundational AI model.
While the company may eventually discover how humans prefer to communicate with robots, at this stage its business model and targeted commercial use case remain a mystery in their own right (fittingly matching the company's name, "Enigma"). While Jacobi declined to reveal specific use cases for the company's technology and AI systems, he noted that the startup is already actively partnering with companies in the healthcare, logistics, and entertainment sectors.