Enigma Raises $70M to Rethink How Humans Control Robots

Enigma, a research lab emerging from stealth, raised a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners also participated. The company is applying that funding to a robotics challenge that goes beyond model capability: making human-robot interaction feel simple, fast, and intuitive.

Enigma is studying how people naturally want to communicate with robots, rather than starting only with dexterity or teleoperation. Co-founder Jonathan Jacobi told TechCrunch the goal is to make interaction as intuitive as adjusting a car’s volume knob. The company is testing whether people prefer text, audio, video examples, or more direct gestures like tap, drag, and drop.

Enigma is launching a large-scale public experiment that lets people interact online with more than 100 proprietary AI robots. The robots are housed in hangars in Israel and California and can perform tasks including drawing with a paintbrush, fighting with swords, and conducting simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks with liquids. Enigma says it built both the robotic arms and the underlying models from the ground up.

Enigma was co-founded by longtime friends Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, who met through hacking competitions as young teens and later served together in Israel’s Unit 8200. Jacobi was described as Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee, recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during Rappaport’s time there. Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah told TechCrunch that the founders’ lack of robotics-industry background gives them “more room for originality.”

Jacobi said Enigma’s experiment is intentionally open-ended, with the company hoping real-world interaction data will reveal better interfaces and potentially better ways to train foundational AI models. He declined to share specific use cases for Enigma’s AI. For now, the company says it is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.