Enigma raises $70M to test whether robot control should feel as simple as turning a knob

Updated July 28, 2026 1:53 pm

Enigma has raised $70 million in seed funding to build a new kind of robotics interface, one the startup believes could make controlling machines feel as effortless as turning a car’s volume dial. The less-than-one-year-old lab is launching from stealth with an unusual global experiment: more than 100 proprietary AI robots that anyone can interact with online, as it seeks to learn how humans naturally want to communicate with machines.

The round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners’ Sarah Guo. Enigma’s bet is that the biggest breakthrough in robotics may not come from a better model alone, but from discovering the simplest possible way for humans to tell robots what to do.

What Enigma is trying to solve

Enigma is entering one of the most competitive areas in artificial intelligence: robotic foundation models that can generalize to unfamiliar tasks. Many companies in the field are chasing the same technical prize, using methods such as training on huge collections of web video, simulating environments, or capturing motion data from human operators wearing sensor-equipped gloves.

Enigma is taking a different route. Instead of focusing only on model performance, it wants to study the interaction itself — how people instruct robots, where they get frustrated, and which forms of communication feel natural enough to use repeatedly.

The company’s premise is simple: if a robot is powerful but cumbersome to control, most people will abandon it. Enigma argues that the interface may be just as important as the intelligence underneath it.

How does Enigma’s public robot experiment work?

Enigma’s answer is an online test bed built around its own robots. Anyone in the world will be able to interact remotely with more than 100 machines housed in hangars in Israel and California.

The robots are designed to perform visible, varied tasks that make human intent easy to observe. According to the company, the demonstrations include drawing with a paintbrush, sparring with swords, and carrying out basic chemistry experiments by moving and mixing flasks.

By opening access to the public, Enigma hopes to collect a broad set of real-world interaction data. The startup says that data will help it evaluate which formats people prefer: text, voice, video examples, or direct manipulation tools such as tapping, dragging, and dropping.

Why the startup thinks interfaces matter as much as intelligence

Robotics has long struggled with the gap between capability and usability. A machine may be able to perform a task in a controlled setting, but if it requires painstaking instruction every time, the average user will not adopt it.

Enigma’s co-founder Jonathan Jacobi says that problem is especially visible in everyday chores. In his view, if a person has to spend too long describing where dishes should go, the robot has already failed. The goal, he argues, is a system so natural that users do not feel they are operating specialized equipment.

Jacobi compares the ideal interaction to adjusting the volume in a car. A simple knob does not force drivers to think in percentages or technical steps; it just gives them immediate, intuitive control. Enigma wants a similarly frictionless “knob” for robots.

That philosophy matters because many robotics teams are optimizing for a world in which humans still need to learn machine-specific commands. Enigma is trying to reverse that logic: make the robot adapt to the human instead.

What questions is Enigma asking users?

Enigma is asking which communication mode feels most natural and most efficient when a person wants something done by a robot.

The company’s experiments are expected to compare options such as writing instructions, speaking to a robot, showing a video example, or using direct graphical controls. The startup says it is open to discovering that the best answer may be a combination of methods rather than a single interface.

That open-ended approach is intentional. By observing how people actually behave, Enigma hopes to surface patterns that might not appear in conventional lab testing.

Who founded Enigma?

Enigma was founded by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, two technologists with deep roots in Israel’s cybersecurity and startup scene.

Jacobi was Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee, and he was previously recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport. Niv and Jacobi met as teenagers while competing in hacking contests, then later worked together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.

When they decided to start a company together last year, they chose robotics and AI — despite not coming from the traditional robotics world — because they saw it as one of the most interesting unsolved problems in technology.

That outsider status is part of the company’s identity. Rather than inheriting the assumptions of established robotics teams, the founders assembled a group of what Jacobi calls their smartest friends from the local tech ecosystem, including people with backgrounds in top AI labs, math Olympiads and, in some cases, incomplete PhD programs they were persuaded to leave behind.

“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,” said Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures. “It affords them more room for originality.”

How is Enigma different from other robotics labs?

Enigma is different because it starts with the user experience rather than the robot’s raw dexterity. Many robotics developers begin by asking how to make machines better at picking up objects, moving in the real world or handling unfamiliar environments. Enigma says the first question should be how people want to issue instructions in the first place.

That shift changes the research agenda. Instead of only training for task execution, the company also wants to gather data on communication preferences, feedback loops and the moments when users feel confused, slow or disengaged.

In practice, that could influence both the interface and the underlying model. Jacobi has suggested the startup may discover a new way to train foundational robotics systems by learning from human-robot interaction at scale.

The company’s public experiment is therefore doing double duty: it is both a product prototype and a data engine.

Why outsider teams can move differently

Outsider teams often ask more basic questions than incumbents do, and that can create room for novel products. In robotics, that may matter because the field has long been shaped by researchers who are highly skilled at manipulation, motion planning and hardware design, but less focused on consumer-grade simplicity.

Enigma is betting that a startup unburdened by conventional robotics assumptions can explore interaction design with fresh eyes. Instead of treating teleoperation or dexterity as the starting point, the company is asking what the best possible experience would look like for a non-expert.

What will the new funding be used for?

Enigma has not disclosed a detailed spending plan, but the funding is expected to support its research lab, robot infrastructure and large-scale data collection efforts.

Running more than 100 robots across two countries is expensive, especially when each system has been developed in-house. The company says it built both the robotic arms and the underlying models from the ground up, a claim that suggests substantial investment in hardware engineering as well as machine learning.

The seed round also gives Enigma the resources to recruit talent in a field that requires rare combinations of expertise. Robotics startups typically need people who understand model training, mechanical systems, controls, simulation, sensor integration and user experience. Enigma appears to be assembling all of those disciplines under one roof.

Which industries is Enigma already targeting?

Enigma says it is already working with companies in healthcare, logistics and entertainment, although it has not yet revealed specific use cases or commercial deployments.

That breadth is notable because these sectors have very different needs. Healthcare might value precision, reliability and safety. Logistics could prioritize throughput and repetitive task handling. Entertainment may care more about expressive movement, novelty or interactive performance.

For now, Enigma is not defining itself by a single vertical market. Instead, it seems to be positioning its platform as a general-purpose robotics interaction layer that could eventually fit multiple industries.

Why investors are paying attention

The size of the seed round signals that investors see robotics interfaces as a potentially major opportunity, not just an academic side project. A $70 million debut is unusually large for a startup that is still publicly defining its exact product shape.

Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital are backing a thesis that the next wave of robotics may need a new human interface stack before it can become truly usable at scale. Sarah Guo’s participation adds further credibility in the AI startup market, where research-heavy companies often need patience as they turn prototypes into products.

Investor interest also reflects a broader shift in artificial intelligence. As foundation models become more capable, more capital is moving toward the practical question of how those models will be applied in the physical world. Robotics sits at the intersection of model intelligence, real-world deployment and embodied interaction — a combination that is expensive, difficult and potentially transformative.

How big is the robotics opportunity?

The opportunity is large because the field still lacks a universally accepted interface for non-expert users. Voice assistants made talking to software feel normal, but robotics has not yet found an equivalent standard for telling physical machines what to do in everyday settings.

If Enigma can identify a simple, repeatable control scheme, it could lower one of the main barriers to adoption. That would matter not only for household robots, but also for industrial, commercial and service robots that need to be managed by people who are not specialists.

The challenge is that robotics is not just a software problem. Unlike chatbots or search tools, robots operate in the physical world, where misunderstandings can lead to damaged objects, unsafe motions or time-consuming corrections. That is why an interface that reduces ambiguity could be as important as a more capable model.

Enigma’s public experiment is an attempt to find that interface before settling on a conventional design that may be less intuitive than necessary.

What happens next?

Enigma is set to emerge from stealth on Monday, turning its research effort into a more visible company with capital, hardware and a public-facing data collection experiment.

The next stage will likely reveal whether the startup can turn broad curiosity about human-robot communication into a durable product strategy. The company still faces a difficult question: even if it finds a better way for people to control robots, what exactly will those robots do first, and who will pay for them?

For now, Enigma’s answer is to keep the platform open, collect as much interaction data as possible and let the market help define the most natural way to use robots. If the bet works, the result may be a new standard for embodied AI — one that feels less like programming a machine and more like turning something familiar, precise and immediate.

Timeline: Enigma’s path to launch

Why this launch matters for AI and robotics

Enigma’s debut matters because it reframes robotics around the human experience, not just the machine. In a field where so much attention goes to model scaling, simulation and dexterity, the startup is arguing that the interface may be the real unlock.

If that thesis proves right, robotics companies may need to think more like consumer product teams and less like pure engineering labs. The most important breakthrough may not be a robot that can do everything, but a robot that people can finally understand, trust and control without effort.

That is the promise behind Enigma’s unusual launch: not simply better robots, but a better conversation between people and machines.