Enigma, a research lab that will emerge from stealth this Monday, has closed a $70 million seed round to study how people naturally interact with robots rather than focusing solely on maximizing model capabilities. The round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.
An online experiment with more than 100 robots
To collect interaction data, Enigma is launching a large public experiment that lets anyone in the world interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary robots. The machines are housed in hangars in Israel and California and are capable of tasks such as drawing with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks with liquids. Enigma says it developed both the robotic arms and the underlying models from scratch.
Founders and team background
Enigma was co-founded by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv. Jonathan Jacobi is described as Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee and was recruited there by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport. Jacobi and Niv first met competing in hacking contests as teenagers and later served together in Israel’s Unit 8200, where they worked on cybersecurity research.
When they decided to start a company last year, they directed their technical skills to AI for robotics — a field they did not claim prior domain expertise in, but one they considered full of compelling unsolved problems. They assembled a team Jacobi calls some of their “smartest friends” from Israel’s tech community, including alumni of top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and several people who left PhD programs to join the startup.
Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures, said: “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. 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?’”
What they want to learn
Enigma’s stated aim is to make human–robot interaction effortless. Jacobi gave an example: if you need to explain for 15 minutes where to put everything for doing the dishes, most people will give up and do it themselves. “Right now, everyone is at that point — even with the most capable models,” he said.
He argues that manipulating robots should be as intuitive as turning an automobile’s volume knob: users would be frustrated if they had to adjust volume by percentage values without knowing whether the result would be too loud or too quiet. Enigma hopes the data from its online experiment will reveal an interface that serves as the robotics equivalent of that simple, effective control.
The public test will examine different ways people might communicate with robots: text, audio, showing a video example, or touch-based interactions like tapping, dragging, and dropping. Jacobi acknowledges the experiment is open-ended, but the team expects that real-world interaction data will help them discover both superior interfaces and better ways to train their foundational AI model.
Business outlook
While Enigma aims to learn how humans prefer to communicate with robots, its immediate commercial applications remain somewhat undefined publicly. Jacobi declined to share specific use cases but said the startup is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.
Enigma’s approach — prioritizing the user experience and communication preferences over starting from raw teleoperation or dexterity capabilities — contrasts with many existing robotics efforts. The results of its public experiment in the coming months will be key to determining whether that strategy produces practical interfaces and foundational models that scale.
