photo above: Enigma founders, Jonathan Jacobi (right) and Gal Niv

Enigma, a physical AI company, emerged from stealth phase 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.

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.

“AI is moving beyond chatbots and screens”

To answer how to build intuitive interfaces with robots, Enigma is unveiling at www.robots.online 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. Jacobi: “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. Our goal is to make intelligent robots as natural to work with as computers and smartphones are today.”

Enigma was founded 11 months ago by CEO Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv. The co-founders met in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they even 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. 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.