Enigma raises $71M to make controlling robots feel effortless

Enigma, a robotics research lab, is set to emerge from stealth on Monday with a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. The less-than-one-year-old startup is taking a different approach to one of AI’s hardest problems — building foundation models that can execute tasks they were never explicitly trained on. Rather than focus purely on model capability, Enigma is studying how humans want to engage with robots in the first place, hoping the findings lead to more intuitive interfaces and, potentially, a different kind of robotic brain.

To gather that data, Enigma is launching a large-scale public experiment letting anyone in the world interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots, housed in hangars in Israel and California. The robots can draw pictures with a paintbrush, fight each other with swords, and run simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks of liquid; Enigma claims it built both the robotic arms and their underlying models from the ground up. The test will compare different ways people might want to direct a robot — text, audio, a video demonstration, or tapping and dragging — in pursuit of an interface co-founder Jonathan Jacobi compares to a car’s volume knob: something adjustable without having to specify an exact outcome. “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, described as Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee and recruited there by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport, co-founded Enigma with longtime friend Gal Niv; the two met as teens in hacking competitions and grew close while serving together in Israel’s Unit 8200 cybersecurity unit. Their team includes alumni of top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and researchers who left PhD programs to join. Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah said the founders’ lack of a robotics-industry background is an asset: insiders tend to start from proven capabilities like teleoperation or dexterity, while Enigma instead started by asking what the ideal human-robot interaction would feel like. Jacobi declined to name specific use cases but said Enigma is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.

Why it matters

If Enigma’s interaction data holds up, it would give robotics makers a reusable interface layer to build on — a volume-knob-simple way to direct machines — instead of each company solving human-robot communication from scratch.