Enigma Raises $71M Seed to Build AI Robots with Intuitive Interfaces

By Deep Researcher | July 27, 2026

Enigma, a research lab emerging from stealth, has raised a $71 million seed round to build AI-powered robots with intuitive human-robot interaction interfaces. The funding comes from Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.

A Different Approach to Robotics

While multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI's hardest problems—building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle—Enigma is taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain.

The Experiment: 100+ AI Robots Online

To test how humans want to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that allows anyone in the world to interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots. These robots are housed in hangars located in Israel and California, and can perform tasks such as:

• Drawing pictures with a paintbrush
• Fighting each other with swords
• Performing simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks with liquids

Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from the ground up.

Founders with Elite Backgrounds

Jonathan Jacobi, Microsoft's youngest-ever employee—recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there—co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv. The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teens, then became close friends while serving together in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.

"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.

The Goal: Effortless Human-Robot Interaction

Jacobi told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human-robot interactions 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."

Jacobi believes manipulating robots should eventually be as intuitive as adjusting a car's volume knob. Users would be frustrated, he argues, if instead of turning a dial, they had to adjust volume by set percentages without knowing if the result would end up too loud or too quiet.

Enigma hopes that data gathered from its online experiment will reveal an interface that becomes the robotics equivalent of the car volume knob. The startup's public test will evaluate different ways for people to communicate with its robots:

• Talking to them over text or audio
• Showing examples as videos
• Tapping, dragging, and dropping

"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?"

Business Applications Already in Motion

While Jacobi declined to share specific use cases for Enigma's AI, he confirmed that the startup is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.

This story was originally published on TechCrunch. Source: TechCrunch.