If telling a robot to do the dishes requires 15 minutes of explaining where every bowl goes, everyone reaches the point of "forget it, I'll just do it myself." That's exactly where robots are right now — even the most capable models need detailed, precise, step-by-step instructions, and the slightest ambiguity leads to mistakes.

Enigma founders Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv believe the problem isn't model capability — it's the human-robot interface. On July 27, the less-than-one-year-old Israeli company officially emerged from stealth, announcing a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.

Two 'Outsiders' and Their Angle of Attack

Enigma's two co-founders are both "outsiders" to the robotics industry.

Jonathan Jacobi was Microsoft's youngest-ever employee, recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there. Gal Niv is his longtime friend — the two met as teenagers in hacking competitions, then served together in Israel's elite intelligence Unit 8200 conducting cybersecurity research. When they decided to launch a startup together last year, they chose AI robotics — a field where they lacked direct experience — because they believed it held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech.

Their team is equally "atypical": their "smartest friends" from Israel's tech ecosystem, including alumni from top AI labs, math olympiad winners, and several people convinced to drop out of PhD programs. As Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah put it: "There are a lot of robotics industry insiders working on the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders — they're not roboticists. It affords them more room for originality. An insider might start with teleoperation or dexterity, but Enigma starts from a very different place: 'What's the ultimate experience?'"

The answer to that "ultimate experience" is simple: controlling a robot should be as intuitive as turning a car's volume knob. When you turn a volume knob, you don't think "it's at 37% and I want it at 62%" — you just twist until it sounds right. Controlling a robot should be the same — no precise instructions, no programming, no learning robot language; as natural as talking to a person.

100 Robots, Open to the World

To find this "volume knob" style of interaction, Enigma did something bold: they deployed over 100 fully proprietary AI robots in hangars in Israel and California, accessible online for anyone in the world to interact with.

These aren't just for show. The robots can draw pictures with paintbrushes, fight each other with swords, and perform simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing liquids in flasks. Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and underlying models entirely from scratch. Global users can interact with these robots through a web interface, trying different modes of interaction — text commands, voice, video demonstrations, tap and drag — while Enigma collects all interaction data in the background to analyze which methods feel most natural and efficient.

It's a very "internet era" approach: rather than perfecting behind closed lab doors like traditional robotics companies, they're putting the product in front of real users at scale, using data to drive iteration. Jacobi admits the experiment is wide open — they don't know exactly what they'll find — but that uncertainty is precisely what excites them.

Enigma is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment, but specific commercial use cases remain an enigma (literally). Yet their core conviction is clear: while everyone is competing on model parameters and dexterous hands, the real bottleneck might be how we talk to machines.

After all, the smartest brain in the world is just an expensive paperweight if it can't understand what you're asking for.

See you tomorrow.