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 run the gamut — from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors.
Enigma, a research lab set to emerge from stealth on Monday, 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.
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.
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 located in Israel and California, can perform tasks such as drawing pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and 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.
Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee — recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there — co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left). 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.
When Jacobi and Niv set out to launch a startup together last year, they decided to apply their technical prowess to AI for robotics, a field where they lacked direct experience, but one they believed held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech.
They assembled a team of what 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 several people who were even convinced to drop out of PhD programs.
“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?’”
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.
“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?”
Jacobi admits that Enigma’s experiment is very open-ended. The hope is that by gathering real-world data on human-robot interaction, the startup will discover not only superior interfaces, but better ways to train its foundational AI model.
The company might eventually figure out how humans prefer to communicate with robots. But for now, its business use case remains an enigma in its own right. While Jacobi declined to share specific use cases for Enigma’s AI, he said that the startup is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.