Enigma Raises $70M to Make Robot Control as Simple as Adjusting the Volume

Robotics startups are pursuing one of artificial intelligence’s most difficult goals: creating foundation models that can handle tasks they were never directly taught to do. Across the industry, teams are experimenting with very different methods, from training on vast libraries of internet video to running simulated environments and capturing human motion with sensor-equipped gloves.

Enigma, a young research lab set to come out of stealth on Monday, is betting on a different starting point. Instead of concentrating only on how capable a robot model can become, the company is focusing on how people naturally interact with machines. Its premise is that better human-robot interaction could lead not only to more intuitive controls, but potentially to a new kind of robotic intelligence as well.

A $70 million launch and a global test

To support that vision, Enigma has secured a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.

The company is pairing that funding with a large public experiment. Enigma plans to let people around the world interact online with more than 100 of its in-house AI robots. Those machines are based in hangars in Israel and California and are designed to carry out a range of activities, including painting with a brush, sword-fighting one another, and conducting simple chemistry tasks such as lifting and mixing flasks containing liquids.

According to Enigma, both the robotic arms and the AI models that drive them were built internally from scratch.

Founders from outside traditional robotics

Enigma was co-founded by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, longtime friends whose paths first crossed in hacking competitions when they were teenagers. Their relationship deepened later during their service in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they worked on cybersecurity research.

Jacobi is also notable for having been Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee, and was later recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his time there. Last year, he and Niv decided to start a company together and turned their attention to AI for robotics.

They were not entering from a conventional robotics background. Even so, they saw the field as one of the most compelling areas in tech, precisely because so many major problems remain unsolved.

To build the company, the pair assembled a team from Israel’s broader technology community. Jacobi has described the group as some of their smartest peers, including people from leading AI labs, mathematics Olympiad winners, and several individuals persuaded to leave PhD programs to join the effort.

“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,” said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. “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?’”

Why Enigma is focused on the interface problem

Enigma’s central argument is that even highly advanced robots will struggle to become widely useful if controlling them remains frustrating. Jacobi believes the current state of the field still places too much burden on the human operator.

“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.”

His view is that working with robots should eventually feel almost effortless. He compares the ideal experience to adjusting a car stereo’s volume: users do not want to micromanage exact percentages or guess whether the result will be too high or too low. They want a simple, intuitive control that behaves the way they expect.

Enigma hopes its large-scale online experiment will help uncover the robotic equivalent of that volume knob. The company intends to study multiple ways people might prefer to communicate with machines and see which approaches feel the most natural.

“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?”

An open-ended strategy with broader ambitions

Jacobi has acknowledged that the experiment is intentionally broad and exploratory. Enigma is not presenting a fixed answer yet. Instead, it wants to collect real-world interaction data at scale and use that information to identify both better interfaces and better ways of training its foundation model.

The company believes that understanding how humans naturally want to direct robots could shape the future of robotic systems more deeply than simply improving raw model performance alone.

What remains less defined for now is the company’s eventual business model. Jacobi did not provide detailed use cases for Enigma’s AI, though he said the startup is already working with partners in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.

For a company named Enigma, that uncertainty may be fitting. But its wager is clear: the next major leap in robotics may come not just from smarter machines, but from making them radically easier for people to use.