- Enigma has emerged from stealth with a $71 million seed round, led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, to build foundation AI models that make robots easier to use across industries.
- The startup was founded by Jonathan Jacobi, who became Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee at 17, alongside former Unit 8200 colleague Gal Niv.
- Enigma is launching robots online, which it says is the world’s first live public AI robotics experience, allowing anyone to interact with real AI-powered robots remotely.
Jonathan Jacobi’s journey into artificial intelligence started unusually early. He began studying computer science at just 13, completed his degree while still in high school, and by 17 became the youngest-ever employee at both Microsoft and cybersecurity giant Check Point. After serving as an officer in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where he met future co-founder Gal Niv, Jacobi turned his attention to what he believes is AI’s next frontier: making robots as intuitive to use as smartphones.
Enigma, the physical AI startup founded by Jacobi and Niv less than a year ago, has emerged from stealth with a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition and Wiz.
Alongside the raise, Enigma is opening Robots.online, a platform where anyone can remotely pilot 100 real AI-powered robots and have them handle physical objects in real time. It joins a sector Tech Funding News has already tracked closely, having recentlyranked the ten best-funded humanoid robot startups to watch in 2026.
Enigma calls this the world’s first public robotics experience. It is also, functionally, a data pipeline. Every session generates footage of a human directing a robot through a task, exactly the kind of expensive, hard-to-source training data that robotics companies usually pay contractors or build mock production lines to collect. Enigma is getting it from the public, packaged as entertainment rather than labour.
The public demo is also a data flywheel
Enigma builds foundation AI models and interfaces designed to run on any robot, cutting the manual data collection and custom engineering that robotics deployments typically require. Robots.online is where that pitch gets tested at scale: 100 machines, open to anyone, generating a continuous stream of human-robot interaction data that feeds straight back into Enigma’s models.
That is a genuinely clever way to solve robotics’ most expensive problem. It is also a question nobody covering the launch has asked directly: what happens to the footage and interaction data generated by people who signed up expecting a novelty experience, not a training job.
That gap is central to how Index Ventures is selling the deal. Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who led the firm’s early investments in Wiz and Datadog, argues that robotics insiders default to solving teleoperation or dexterity first, while Jacobi and Niv started from a different question entirely: what should the experience of using a robot actually feel like. He frames their lack of robotics pedigree as room for original thinking rather than a gap to close.
Jacobi frames the company’s edge the same way: capability alone will not win the category, he says, because “if they aren’t intuitive to use, most people never will: adopt them, whatever a robot can technically do.
A crowded race for the same layer
Enigma’s pitch, own the software layer that sits above any robot body, puts it in direct competition with far better-capitalised players.
Skild AI has raised $1.4 billion to build what it calls a universal brain for every robot. Physical Intelligence is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation for its π0 foundation model. Genesis AI emerged with $105 million for a robot foundation model built around open-source simulation.
Enigma’s $71 million puts it well behind that funding, competing on interface design and public data collection rather than sheer compute.
The wider pattern is hard to miss: investors are increasingly favouring the software brain over the robot body, a shift TFN has tracked across a wave of 2026 raises where robotics and embodied AI dominated a single month’s unicorn count. Whether the market can sustain this many well-funded companies chasing the identical thesis is the open question none of them can answer yet.
Building the intelligence behind physical AI
Enigma will use the funding to expand its research and engineering team, add computing capacity, and push deployments into retail, healthcare, and entertainment. The company has not disclosed current headcount, total funding to date, or a valuation.
As robotics funding accelerates past software’s old playbook of scraping the public web for training data, using the public to physically operate real machines may be the next place the data-consent question gets asked, and Enigma is the first company to build its entire public launch around it.
