A radically different approach to robotics
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. Their approaches range from studying millions of web videos to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks.
Enigma, a research lab emerging from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different path. Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots — hoping these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain.
A $71M bet on human-robot interaction
To finance its mission, Enigma raised a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. The massive round reflects investor appetite for novel approaches to embodied AI.
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, housed in hangars in Israel and California, can draw pictures with paintbrushes, fight each other with swords, and perform simple chemistry experiments.
Founders with an outsider perspective
Jonathan Jacobi, Microsoft's youngest-ever employee, co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv. The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teens and served together in Israel's elite Unit 8200. Despite lacking direct robotics experience, they believed the field held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech.
"There are a lot of robotics industry insiders, 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 quest for the robot volume knob
Jacobi believes manipulating robots should eventually be as intuitive as adjusting a car's volume knob. "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.
The startup's public test will evaluate different ways for people to communicate with its robots — through text, audio, video examples, or direct manipulation. The data gathered could reveal not only superior interfaces but better ways to train foundational AI models.
While the business use case remains unconfirmed, Jacobi says Enigma is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.
