Robotics startup Enigma emerged from stealth in July 2026 after raising a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners. The less-than-one-year-old company is focused not on building more capable robots, but on making them easier for people to control.
Co-founders Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv met as teenagers competing in hacking competitions and later served together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200 cybersecurity unit. Jacobi is notable as Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee, recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport. The two launched Enigma last year, assembling a team that includes alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and researchers who left PhD programs to join the company.
To study how people want to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale public experiment in 2026 that lets anyone interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots. The robots are housed in hangars in Israel and California and can perform tasks such as drawing with a paintbrush, sword fighting, and conducting simple chemistry experiments. Enigma says it developed both the robotic arms and their underlying AI models entirely in-house.
The experiment will test different interaction methods — text, audio, video demonstrations, and touch-based controls like tapping and dragging — to identify what Jacobi calls the “volume knob” of robotics: an interface so intuitive that users never feel the need to give up and do a task themselves. “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 told TechCrunch.
Enigma says it is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment, though specific use cases have not been disclosed. The data gathered from its public experiment may also inform how the company trains its foundational AI model, suggesting the interface research and model development could evolve together.
Source: TechCrunch