Enigma, an Israeli-founded robotics research lab, has raised a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners also participating. The under-one-year-old startup is emerging from stealth to pursue a different approach to one of AI's hardest challenges: building robots that can perform tasks they were not explicitly trained for, by studying how humans naturally want to interact with machines rather than focusing solely on model capability.

To gather data, Enigma is launching a public online experiment letting anyone worldwide control more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots, housed in hangars in Israel and California, performing tasks such as painting, sword-fighting and simple chemistry experiments. The company was co-founded by Jonathan Jacobi, Microsoft's youngest-ever employee, and Gal Niv, friends since their teenage hacking days and later colleagues in Israel's Unit 8200 cybersecurity unit; both say their outsider status in robotics gives them freedom to rethink the field. Jacobi's stated goal is to make controlling robots as intuitive as turning a car's volume knob, rather than requiring lengthy explicit instructions.