Enigma raises $71 million seed round and puts the world's first interactive AI robots online. Founded by the youngest-ever employee at Microsoft, Enigma is building the intelligence layer for robotics through breakthrough AI research, with the goal of transforming how naturally humans interact with intelligent machines. Later today, the company opens the world's first live public AI robotics experience - anyone, anywhere, can interact with real AI-powered robots online, in real time. SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 27, 2026 (Newswire.com) - Enigma, a physical AI company, emerged from stealth today with a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition, Wiz and others. Founded less than a year ago by Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, Enigma builds AI models to make robots intelligent and effortless to use. The company trains AI models that bring intelligence to any robot, on any hardware, and builds novel user interfaces that make them simple to use. Later today, Enigma will launch the world's first interactive AI robotics experience at www.robots.online - real robots, powered by AI, that anyone can interact with in real time. AI has advanced rapidly, but making it operate reliably in the physical world remains one of tech's biggest unsolved problems. Investors poured over $40 billion into robotics in 2025, with humanoids alone projected to become a multi-trillion-dollar category. Yet most robots still require heavy customization, manual data collection, and significant engineering to work in the real world. Enigma has developed more efficient ways to train its foundation models for robotics, lowering the requirements for massive manual data collection while keeping systems reliable in physical environments. The company is building a unified software solution that pairs its models with the ability to adapt them across different robots and settings - removing much of the engineering complexity traditionally required to deploy intelligent robots. While robots have grown more capable, they remain difficult to use. Enigma advances capability and usability together, developing AI models alongside novel user interfaces and robot-agnostic software that make robots intuitive, on any robot and for any task. The goal is robots that are not just powerful, but natural to use and interact with, for engineers, enterprises, and end users alike. "No matter how capable robots get, if they aren't intuitive to use, most people never will," said Jonathan Jacobi, co-Founder and CEO of Enigma. To answer how to build intuitive interfaces with robots, Enigma is unveiling a first-of-its-kind experience: 100 real AI-powered robots that anyone can use online, in real time. Using Enigma's models and interfaces, people will have robots complete tasks and handle physical objects. At this scale, Enigma can learn how people instinctively approach robots - feeding directly back into better models and interfaces. "Once in a generation, a technology shift reshapes not just software, but the structure of entire industries," said Jonathan Jacobi, co-founder and CEO of Enigma. "We believe AI's next chapter is moving beyond chatbots and screens into systems that can understand, adapt to, and operate in the physical world. We're building the intelligence layer for robotics through breakthrough AI models and novel human-robot interfaces. Our goal is to make intelligent robots as natural to work with as computers and smartphones are today." Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv met in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they shared a bunk bed. Jacobi started a computer science degree at 13 and finished it in high school, then became the youngest-ever employee at both Microsoft and Check Point at 17, before joining unit 8200 as an officer. Niv began hardware hacking at 10, joined a cybersecurity startup at 17, completed a four-year degree in a single year, and became the unit's youngest cyber-operations manager. After years of working together across cybersecurity, scientific research and large-scale systems, they founded Enigma on the belief that physical AI is the next frontier. In 11 months, Enigma has assembled a deliberately heterogeneous team - researchers and engineers with years of research experience across AI, mathematics, physics, cybersecurity, and robotics, from Math Olympiad medalists to researchers and low-level system engineers. What unites them is a track record of solving real-world open problems. Several left PhD programs and research tracks to work on one of the field's biggest unsolved problems: bringing intelligence into the physical world. "Every major technological shift creates a moment where the infrastructure for an entirely new category still needs to be built," said Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures. "We believe what impressed us about Enigma was the team's vision around the full stack needed to make intelligent robotics usable in the real world, from the underlying AI systems to the abstraction and interface layers that can help bring this technology into everyday life." Enigma will use the funding to grow its research and engineering teams, scale compute, and expand real-world deployments. The company is already working with partners in entertainment, retail, and health. It also plans more public experiences that put AI-powered robots in front of people - advancing its AI research and building novel user interfaces. Contact Information: Ofir Zimber [email protected] +1 3478435223

Enigma raises $71M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume. The massive seed round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners. 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.

Proof and Enigma have partnered to launch Business Certificates, a verified credential system addressing business identity fraud and securing agentic commerce. The solution combines Enigma's business identity data with Proof's authorisation infrastructure to bind current business identities to authorised individuals and systems. According to FinCEN analysis of Bank Secrecy Act filings, false records represented part of $212 billion in suspicious activity. Traditional KYB verification provides only a timestamp, creating gaps exploited by fraudsters impersonating businesses through spoofed domains and fabricated executives. Business Certificates use continuously updated data covering over 100 million US legal entities, reflecting real-time changes in ownership, licensing, or sanctions status. The system integrates with Proof's x401 protocol for AI agent verification. Proof has secured over $640 billion in transactions for 10,000 organisations, including 16 Fortune 100 companies. Business Certificates are now available.