Enigma's robot-interface bet: $71M seed, 100+ robots open to the public

An AI-for-robotics research lab building robot-control foundation models and interfaces, tested live by anyone online via 100+ robots in hangars in Israel and California.

Robot adoption is blocked by the interface, not model smarts — so open 100+ robots to the public and let real interactions define both UX and training.

$71M seed led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners participating

Co-founders Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv met as teenagers at hacking competitions and served together in Israel's Unit 8200, where they did cybersecurity research. Last year they set out to apply their engineering background to robotics, a field they had no direct experience in, betting it held tech's most exciting unsolved problems. They recruited what Jacobi calls their 'smartest friends': alumni of top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and people convinced to drop out of PhD programs.

Enigma raised a $71M seed led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with Conviction's Sarah Guo participating. On 2026-07-27 it emerged from stealth and opened more than 100 of its proprietary robots — arms and models both built from scratch — to anyone online. The robots draw with paintbrushes, spar with swords, and mix chemistry flasks in hangars in Israel and California; the public experiment tests whether people prefer text, audio, video demonstrations, or tap-and-drag control.

Interface-first flips the industry question from 'can the robot do it' to 'will anyone use it' — a different and cheaper bottleneck to attack.

Opening 100+ robots to the public makes every online interaction a model-training sample and a UX experiment at the same time.

The founders deliberately chose a field they were not insiders in, arguing outsiders ask questions incumbents skip.

A $71M seed with no disclosed valuation or revenue shows investors priced the thesis and team, not traction.

When an industry fixates on capability, the binding constraint can be the user interface. Opening the product to the public turns every interaction into both UX research and training data.

As of 2026-09-02 Enigma is running its public experiment at robots.online with 100+ robots and says it is partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment without disclosing use cases. It has not published revenue, customers, or a valuation, and the business model remains open-ended: the interface it discovers is meant to define both the product and the next training phase of its foundation model.