Enigma raises $70M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume

Many robotics companies are grappling with one of AI’s toughest problems: building base models capable of tasks they’ve never been explicitly trained to handle. Their methods run the gamut – from studying millions of web videos and doing computer simulations to collecting motion data from people performing tasks with gloves with built-in sensors.

Enigma, a research lab set to go public on Monday, is taking a very different approach. Rather than focusing solely on the power of the models, the less than one-year-old startup wants to learn how humans interact with robots in the hope that this interaction will lead to more intuitive communication and perhaps a different kind of robot brain.

To fund its mission, Enigma has raised $70 million in interest led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.

To test how humans want to interact with machines, Enigma is launching a massive experiment that allows anyone in the world to communicate online with more than 100 of its AI robots. These robots, installed in hangars located in Israel and California, can perform tasks such as painting pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemical experiments by picking up and mixing flasks and liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both the robot arms and their sub-models from the ground up.

Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft’s youngest employee — who was hired by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport while he was there — co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left). The two met while competing in hacking competitions when they were young, and became best friends while serving together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.

When Jacobi and Niv first launched the startup together last year, they decided to use their technical strengths in robotics AI, a field where they had no direct experience, but one that they believed held the most interesting unsolved problems in technology.

They put together a team of what Jacobi describes as some of their “smartest friends” from the Israeli tech ecosystem and community – including alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and a few people who were even convinced to drop out of PhD programs.

“There are many insiders in the robotics industry who are participating in the next wave of artificial intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders – they are not robots. It gives them more opportunity to evolve,” said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. “An insider might start with teleoperation or dexterity, but Enigma starts from a very different place: ‘What is the ultimate experience?’

Jacobi told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human-robot interactions effortless.

“If you have to clean your dishes and spend 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put everything, everyone reaches the point of ‘Forget it, I’ll do it myself.’,‘” Jacobi said. “Right now, everyone is in that moment — even the most talented models.”

Jacobi believes that trick robots should be as accurate as adjusting the volume of a car knob. Users can be frustrated, he says, if instead of turning on the phone, they have to adjust the volume by a set percentage without knowing whether the result will end up being too loud or too quiet.

Enigma hopes that the data collected from its online tests will produce an interface that becomes robotics the size of a car’s volume knob. The first public test will explore different ways for people to interact with its robots.

“We’re going to learn a lot about what’s the best way to interact with robots,” Jacobi said. “Do we want to just talk to them through text or audio? Do we want to show them an example like a video? Or maybe we want to tap, drag, and drop?”

Jacobi admits that Enigma’s experiments are very open-ended. The hope is that by collecting real-world data about human-robot interactions, the startup will not only find superior workstations, but better ways to train the underlying AI model.

The company may finally figure out how people prefer to interact with robots. But for now, its business use case remains a mystery in itself. While Jacobi declined to share specific use cases for Enigma’s AI, he said the startup is already working with companies in healthcare, transportation, and entertainment.