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 / ACCESS Newswire / July 27, 2026 / 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 Zimberofirz@tellny.com+1 3478435223SOURCE: EnigmaView the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

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