Enigma Raises $70M to Make Robot Control as Simple as Turning a Dial

Multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI’s hardest challenges in 2026: building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle. Their approaches vary widely—from analyzing millions of web videos and running computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks while wearing sensor-embedded gloves. Enigma, a research lab emerging from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing solely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup aims to study how humans engage with robots, hoping these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a new kind of robotic brain. To finance its mission, Enigma raised a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. To explore how humans prefer to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that allows anyone worldwide to interact online with over 100 of its proprietary AI robots. These robots, housed in hangars in Israel and California, can draw pictures with a paintbrush, fight each other with swords, and perform simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks of liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from scratch. Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee—recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his tenure there—co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left). The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teens and later became close friends while serving together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research. When Jacobi and Niv decided to launch a startup last year, they applied their technical expertise to AI for robotics—a field where they lacked direct experience but believed held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech. They assembled a team that Jacobi describes as some of their “smartest friends” from Israel’s tech ecosystem and community, including alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and even several individuals who left PhD programs to join. “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. This gives them more room for originality,” said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. “An insider might start with teleoperation capability or dexterity, but Enigma begins from a very different place: ‘What’s the ultimate experience?’” 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 that 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 complex settings every time.

via TechCrunch Startups