Enigma raises $70m seed round to simplify robot control
Enigma has secured $70 million in funding to tackle the difficulty of controlling robots. The company plans to make interaction as simple as turning a volume knob, rather than relying on complex programming or explicit instructions.
The startup, which is emerging from stealth on Monday, takes a different path than other robotics firms. While competitors train foundation models on millions of web videos or use sensors in human gloves, Enigma focuses on how people naturally engage with machines. The goal is to build intuitive interfaces and potentially a new type of robotic brain.
Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital led the investment, with Sarah Guo from Conviction Partners joining the round.
To test human preferences, Enigma is running a large-scale online experiment. Participants worldwide can interact with over 100 of the company’s proprietary AI robots. These machines, located in hangars in Israel and California, can draw with paintbrushes, fight with swords, and mix chemicals in flasks. The team built both the robotic arms and the underlying models from scratch.
The founders
Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv co-founded the company. Jacobi is the youngest employee in Microsoft’s history, hired by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport. The two met as teenagers in hacking competitions and later served together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they worked on cybersecurity research.
They launched Enigma last year to apply their technical skills to robotics, a field where they had no direct experience but saw as full of unsolved problems. They gathered a team of friends from Israel’s tech scene, including former top AI lab alumni, math Olympiad winners, and several PhD students who left their programmes to join.
Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, noted that the founders are outsiders in the robotics industry. “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,” Shah said. “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?'”
Aim for effortless control
Jacobi told TechCrunch that the company wants human-robot interactions to feel completely effortless.
“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.”
The founders argue that current methods fail because they require too much effort. Jacobi compares this to adjusting a car’s volume. Users would be frustrated if they had to set volume by percentage without knowing the result would be too loud or too quiet. Instead, they should simply turn a dial.
Enigma hopes the data from its public test will reveal an interface that acts as a robotics equivalent to that car volume knob. The experiment will evaluate different ways for people to communicate with the machines.
“We’re going to learn a lot about what is the right way to interact with robots,” Jacobi said. “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 experiment is open-ended. The hope is that gathering real-world data will not only find superior interfaces but also improve how the company trains its foundational AI model.
Specific business applications remain an enigma at this stage. Jacobi declined to share details but confirmed the startup is already partnering with firms in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.
