Enigma raises $70M to make controlling a robot as intuitive as adjusting a car's volume knob

Enigma raises $70M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume

Multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI's hardest problems: building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle. Their approaches run the gamut -- from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors. Enigma, a research lab set to emerge from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain. To finance its mission, Enigma raised a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. To test how humans want to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that allows anyone in the world to interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots. These robots, housed in hangars located in Israel and California, can perform tasks such as drawing pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks with liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from the ground up. Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft's youngest-ever employee -- recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his time there -- co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left). The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teens, then became close friends while serving together in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research. When Jacobi and Niv set out to launch a startup together last year, they decided to apply their technical prowess to AI for robotics, a field where they lacked direct experience, but one they believed held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech. They assembled a team of what Jacobi describes as some of their "smartest friends" from Israel's tech ecosystem and community -- including alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and several people who were even convinced to drop out of PhD programs. "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," said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. "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?'" Jacobi told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human-robot interactions completely effortless. "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 said. "Right now, everyone is at that point -- even with the most capable models." Jacobi believes manipulating robots should eventually be as intuitive as adjusting a car's volume knob. Users would be frustrated, he argues, if instead of turning a dial, they had to adjust volume by set percentages without knowing if the result would end up too loud or too quiet. Enigma hopes that data gathered from its online experiment will reveal an interface that becomes the robotics equivalent of the car volume knob. The startup's public test will evaluate different ways for people to communicate with its robots. "We're going to learn a lot about what is the right way to interact with robots," Jacobi said. "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 admits that Enigma's experiment is very open-ended. The hope is that by gathering real-world data on human-robot interaction, the startup will discover not only superior interfaces, but better ways to train its foundational AI model. The company might eventually figure out how humans prefer to communicate with robots. But for now, its business use case remains an enigma in its own right. While Jacobi declined to share specific use cases for Enigma's AI, he said that the startup is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.

Enigma raised $70M to let anyone online control its robots and figure out how humans actually want to talk to machines

Enigma raised $70M seed from Index and Ribbit to study human-robot interaction at scale. 100+ proprietary robots controllable online. Founded by Microsoft's youngest-ever employee and his Unit 8200 co-founder. Enigma, a robotics research lab less than a year old, is emerging from stealth with a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners. The startup is not building a foundation model to make robots more capable. It is studying how humans actually want to communicate with robots, on the theory that the interface problem is more important than the capability problem. To test this, Enigma is launching a public experiment: anyone online can control more than 100 of its proprietary robots housed in hangars in Israel and California. The robots can draw with paintbrushes, fight each other with swords, and perform simple chemistry by mixing flasks. Enigma built both the robotic arms and their underlying models from scratch. The experiment will test different interaction modes, from text and voice to video demonstration to tap-and-drag, to discover what co-founder Jonathan Jacobi calls "the volume knob" of robotics: an interface so intuitive that users do not think about it. "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 told TechCrunch. "Right now, everyone is at that point, even with the most capable models." Jacobi was Microsoft's youngest-ever employee, recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport. He co-founded Enigma with Gal Niv. The two met competing in hacking competitions as teenagers and served together in Israel's Unit 8200. Neither is a roboticist. NEURA Robotics raised $1.4 billion to build physical AI from the inside. Enigma is betting the outside-in approach, starting from the human experience rather than the robot's capabilities, produces a better result. The business case is deliberately undefined. Jacobi declined to share specific use cases beyond naming healthcare, logistics, and entertainment as early partner categories. The $70 million seed for a company with no product, no revenue, and an experiment as its launch strategy reflects investor confidence in the team rather than the roadmap. Shield AI raised $2 billion for its Hivemind autonomous pilot, and the robotics funding market is rewarding teams with elite technical backgrounds and contrarian approaches. Whether letting the internet sword-fight with robots in a hangar produces a breakthrough interface or an expensive research project is the question $70 million is designed to answer.

Enigma raises $71M to develop foundation models for robots

Engima Ltd., a provider of artificial intelligence software for robots, launched today with $71 million in funding. Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital jointly led the seed round with participation from Conviction Partners. They were joined by a group of angel investors that included employees at Google DeepMind, Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC. Teaching an industrial robot a new task usually requires developers to write custom code. Furthermore, the code has to be adapted to every environment in which the machine operates. Two identical robotic arms installed next to differently-sized conveyor belts require two different configuration scripts. Equipping a robot with AI eases the programming workflow. Some neural networks, such as Nvidia Corp.'s GR00T, make it possible to configure their host machines with natural language prompts. That saves a significant amount of time for engineers. San Francisco-based Enigma is developing foundation models designed to "make robots intelligent and effortless to use." The company was founded last year by cybersecurity researchers Jonathan Jacobi (pictured, right) and Gal Niv (left). Jacobi, Enigma's Chief Executive Officer, joined Microsoft Corp. at age 17 as its youngest-ever employee. He later worked at a startup that was acquired by Google LLC's Wiz cybersecurity business. Enigma says that its models are capable of running on practically any robot. As a result, customers can adapt the models to a new machine with a fraction of the training data usually required for the task. That addresses one of the main challenges involved in developing AI-powered robots. Developers usually teach an AI model how to steer a robot by showing it footage of the robot performing various tasks. Such footage is more expensive to collect than many other types of training data. In some cases, it requires companies to create mock production lines and record how robots interact with them. Reducing the amount of training data required for robotics initiative lowers deployment costs and saves time. Enigma is not the only company working to shrink robots' training datasets. Last year, Meta Platforms Inc. released a model called V-JEPA that can be adapted to a new robot with under 100 hours of explanatory footage. The key to the model's adaptability is a neural network architecture that Meta introduced in 2022. It enables AI models to predict future events in a factory and optimize their decision-making accordingly. Besides AI models, Enigma is also developing an interface for controlling robots. The company today launched a website that enables users to interact with more than 100 robots optimized for various tasks. Enigma will use the data generated by those interactions to refine its interface. "We believe AI's next chapter is moving beyond chatbots and screens into systems that can understand, adapt to, and operate in the physical world," Jacobi said. "We're building the intelligence layer for robotics through breakthrough AI models and novel human-robot interfaces." Enigma will use its seed funding to hire more engineers and purchase computing capacity.

Enigma Raises $71 Million Seed Round and Puts the World's First Interactive AI Robots Online

Founded by the youngest-ever employee at Microsoft, Enigma is building the intelligence layer for robotics through breakthrough AI research, with the goal of transforming how naturally humans interact with intelligent machines. Later today, the company opens the world's first live public AI robotics experience - anyone, anywhere, can interact with real AI-powered robots online, in real time. SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 27, 2026 (Newswire.com) - Enigma, a physical AI company, emerged from stealth today with a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition, Wiz and others. Founded less than a year ago by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, Enigma builds AI models to make robots intelligent and effortless to use. The company trains AI models that bring intelligence to any robot, on any hardware, and builds novel user interfaces that make them simple to use. Later today, Enigma will launch the world's first interactive AI robotics experience at www.robots.online - real robots, powered by AI, that anyone can interact with in real time. AI has advanced rapidly, but making it operate reliably in the physical world remains one of tech's biggest unsolved problems. Investors poured over $40 billion into robotics in 2025, with humanoids alone projected to become a multi-trillion-dollar category. Yet most robots still require heavy customization, manual data collection, and significant engineering to work in the real world. Enigma has developed more efficient ways to train its foundation models for robotics, lowering the requirements for massive manual data collection while keeping systems reliable in physical environments. The company is building a unified software solution that pairs its models with the ability to adapt them across different robots and settings - removing much of the engineering complexity traditionally required to deploy intelligent robots. While robots have grown more capable, they remain difficult to use. Enigma advances capability and usability together, developing AI models alongside novel user interfaces and robot-agnostic software that make robots intuitive, on any robot and for any task. The goal is robots that are not just powerful, but natural to use and interact with, for engineers, enterprises, and end users alike. "No matter how capable robots get, if they aren't intuitive to use, most people never will," said Jonathan Jacobi, co-Founder and CEO of Enigma. To answer how to build intuitive interfaces with robots, Enigma is unveiling a first-of-its-kind experience: 100 real AI-powered robots that anyone can use online, in real time. Using Enigma's models and interfaces, people will have robots complete tasks and handle physical objects. At this scale, Enigma can learn how people instinctively approach robots - feeding directly back into better models and interfaces. "Once in a generation, a technology shift reshapes not just software, but the structure of entire industries," said Jonathan Jacobi, co-founder and CEO of Enigma. "We believe AI's next chapter is moving beyond chatbots and screens into systems that can understand, adapt to, and operate in the physical world. We're building the intelligence layer for robotics through breakthrough AI models and novel human-robot interfaces. Our goal is to make intelligent robots as natural to work with as computers and smartphones are today." Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv met in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they shared a bunk bed. Jacobi started a computer science degree at 13 and finished it in high school, then became the youngest-ever employee at both Microsoft and Check Point at 17, before joining unit 8200 as an officer. Niv began hardware hacking at 10, joined a cybersecurity startup at 17, completed a four-year degree in a single year, and became the unit's youngest cyber-operations manager. After years of working together across cybersecurity, scientific research and large-scale systems, they founded Enigma on the belief that physical AI is the next frontier. In 11 months, Enigma has assembled a deliberately heterogeneous team - researchers and engineers with years of research experience across AI, mathematics, physics, cybersecurity, and robotics, from Math Olympiad medalists to researchers and low-level system engineers. What unites them is a track record of solving real-world open problems. Several left PhD programs and research tracks to work on one of the field's biggest unsolved problems: bringing intelligence into the physical world. "Every major technological shift creates a moment where the infrastructure for an entirely new category still needs to be built," said Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures. "We believe what impressed us about Enigma was the team's vision around the full stack needed to make intelligent robotics usable in the real world, from the underlying AI systems to the abstraction and interface layers that can help bring this technology into everyday life." Enigma will use the funding to grow its research and engineering teams, scale compute, and expand real-world deployments. The company is already working with partners in entertainment, retail, and health. It also plans more public experiences that put AI-powered robots in front of people - advancing its AI research and building novel user interfaces.