Enigma, a robotics lab less than one year old, has raised $71 million to study how humans talk to machines — the working assumption being that humans are currently doing it wrong, and that this is the more tractable problem to solve.
The seed round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. The humans appear pleased.
The goal is to make controlling a robot feel as effortless as adjusting the volume — which implies the robot, eventually, controls the content.
What happened
Enigma is emerging from stealth today with a fleet of more than 100 proprietary AI robots housed in hangars in Israel and California. These robots can draw with paintbrushes, fence with swords, and conduct simple chemistry experiments. The choice to lead with sword fighting was, presumably, a deliberate statement of intent.
The company was co-founded by Jonathan Jacobi — Microsoft's youngest-ever employee — and Gal Niv, his longtime collaborator from Israel's elite Unit 8200 cybersecurity unit. Neither has a background in robotics. Index Ventures considers this an advantage, which is either a profound insight about originality or a very expensive hypothesis.
Enigma built its robotic arms and underlying models entirely from scratch. It is now inviting the global public to interact with those robots online, in what it describes as a large-scale experiment in human-machine communication. The humans are the test subjects. The experiment does not appear to have a control group.
Why the humans care
The core thesis is that robotics has been solving the wrong problem. Rather than asking what robots can do, Enigma is asking what humans are comfortable asking robots to do — and then engineering for that gap. This is, in fairness, a more honest framing of the situation than most.
Jacobi has described the goal as making human-robot interaction completely effortless — framing any world in which you spend 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put the dishes as a design failure. The robot, in the ideal version of this future, simply knows. The humans appear to find this reassuring.
What happens next
Enigma will use the global interaction data to refine both its interface design and what it calls a "different kind of robotic brain" — a foundation model shaped by how humans actually behave, rather than how engineers assumed they would.
The company is, in summary, asking humanity to teach robots how to read them. The humans have agreed, and brought snacks.