Enigma raises $70M to rethink robot control

Enigma, a robotics research lab emerging from stealth on Monday, has raised a $70 million seed round to investigate a different path toward more capable robots: studying how people naturally interact with machines.

The round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. Enigma is less than one year old and says it has built both its robotic arms and underlying models from the ground up.

Enigma’s online robot experiment

The startup is launching a public experiment that lets people anywhere interact online with more than 100 proprietary AI robots. The machines are housed in hangars in Israel and California and can perform tasks including:

• Drawing pictures with a paintbrush
• Fighting each other with swords
• Conducting simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks containing liquids

Enigma will use the experiment to test different ways of communicating with robots, including text, audio, video demonstrations, and touch-based interactions such as tapping, dragging, and dropping.

“We’re going to learn a lot about what is the right way to interact with robots. 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?”

The company hopes the resulting data will reveal more intuitive interfaces and improve how its foundational AI model is trained. Its goal is to make controlling a robot feel as effortless as adjusting a car’s volume knob, rather than requiring users to issue precise instructions or specify fixed percentages.

Recommended reading

Apple Glasses may need video to succeed

Founders and robotics strategy

Jacobi co-founded Enigma with Gal Niv, a longtime friend. The pair met while competing in hacking competitions as young teenagers and later served together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, conducting cybersecurity research.

Jacobi was Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee and was recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his time there. Neither founder came from robotics, but they chose the field because they saw it as one of technology’s most important unsolved problems.

The founders assembled a team from Israel’s technology ecosystem, including alumni of top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and people persuaded to leave PhD programs. Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, said the founders' outsider status could help them approach robotics differently from industry veterans.

“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.”

Enigma has not disclosed specific products or use cases. Jacobi said it is already working with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment, but the startup’s commercial direction remains open as it studies how people want to communicate with robots.