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.

Proof and Enigma partner to launch a verified business identity and authorization layer for U.S. Businesses. Every business needs to claim its identity online. Proof built the infrastructure to do it. Pat Kinsel May 27, 2026 By Pat Kinsel, CEO, Proof and Hicham Oudghiri, CEO, Enigma A regional bank onboards a new business customer. KYB runs clean. The account opens. Six months later, that customer initiates a multi-million dollar wire to a vendor it has never paid before. At that moment, the six-month-old verification starts to show its age. Who owns the business now? Does the person sending the wire still have the authority to do so? Is the business even still operating the same way it was when the account opened? The vendor can't prove the receiving account is legitimately its own. A verification record is a timestamp. It answered the question the day it was run and is trusted long after the facts beneath it have changed. This is not an edge case. It is how business identity has worked for decades. Wiring money is just one scenario Proof hear from customers. However, the same gap shows up everywhere a business has to be trusted: a press release attributed to your company that your communications team never wrote, an account statement your finance team never issued, a vendor contract circulated under your letterhead. Fraudsters aren't just redirecting payments. They are impersonating entire businesses by spoofing email domains, fabricating executives, or generating content in your brand's identity because there is no credential that proves otherwise. This is why Proof and Enigma are partnering to help solve it. The problem is bigger than transactions. FinCEN's analysis of identity-related suspicious activity found false records which, including fake identification, forged documentation, or manipulated records, ranked as the second largest fraud category across 1.6 million Bank Secrecy Act filings, representing part of $212 billion in suspicious activity. False records aren't just a payments problem. They are announcements, account statements, contracts, and authorizations that carry a business's name without carrying its verified identity. In 2025, deepfake incidents surged to over 8 million, up from 500,000 in 2023. AI-generated content has reached a point where visual inspection is no longer a reliable sanity check. One response to help gaining regulatory momentum is C2PA, a cryptographic provenance standard for media. C2PA has the support of over 6,000 organizations. Proof is building C2PA support into Business Certificates. That means a business can use the same verified credential to sign a wire, a press release, a video statement, or a contract - with a full auditable trail back to a verified identity. What Proof is launching. Proof and Enigma are issuing Business Certificates: verified credentials that bind a current business identity to the delegated authority of the people and systems authorized to act on that business's behalf. Each certificate is issued by Proof, following the same identity verification standard that has underpinned more than $640 billion in real estate transactions and $150 billion in annual authorizations over the past decade. FIPS Level 3 certified. WebTrust audited. The rigor a notary, regulator, or counterparty can rely on now extends across every high-trust business interaction, not just the ones that happen to involve paper. The identity underneath is maintained by Enigma. Its graph resolves more than 100 million U.S. legal entities across billions of government filings and 80 million officers and principals, refreshed continuously against state registries, federal records, sanctions watchlists, and beneficial ownership submissions. When a business's status changes, the credential reflects it. Proof don't sell snapshots. A snapshot is precisely what fails the moment a business stops being what it was. The certificate isn't just shown. It's used to sign. Bound to a wire, a vendor contract, a release, an agent instruction, the signature carries verified identity into whatever the business puts into the world. Every act becomes traceable back to a real, verified business and a real, authorized person or system. The wire, resolved. And everything else. The same wire arrives with a Business Certificate attached. The customer can confirm the instruction came from someone currently authorized to send it. The bank can confirm the business is still in good standing. The vendor can prove the receiving account is actually its own. The records still sit in the past. The credential answers in the present. The same logic extends to every channel and transaction where a business's identity can be stolen or spoofed: ACH changes, vendor contracts, press releases, account statements, email domains, and the AI agents acting on a business's behalf with no human in the loop. Each one stops being a record waiting to be reconciled and becomes a signed act with identity baked in. For decades, notaries answered part of this question for paper. For digital in the era of AI, business identity needs to work the same way consumer identity already does: verified once, portable everywhere, and impossible to credibly fake. Business Certificates are how Proof get there.