Two non-roboticists raised $70M to argue the robot industry is solving the wrong problem

A stealth robotics lab less than a year old is emerging with roughly $70 million in seed funding and an unusual public experiment: anyone with a browser can drive more than 100 of Enigma's proprietary robotic arms, housed in hangars in Israel and California, through a portal that lets them paint with brushes, sword-fight, and mix flasks.

The bet comes from Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv, both ex-members of Unit 8200, the Israeli military's signals-intelligence unit, who met at teenage hacking competitions and who are explicitly not roboticists. They are betting the robotics field has its priorities inverted. "We're looking for what we call the volume knob of robotics," Jacobi told TechCrunch, referring to an interface so intuitive that users stop thinking about it.

The seed was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners participating. It lands the same week NEURA Robotics announced a reported $1.4 billion inside-out "physical AI" raise, putting Enigma's outside-in interface thesis on the table at a price the field cannot ignore.

The business case is deliberately undefined; Jacobi named healthcare and logistics as tentative directions without specifics. The portal at robots.online is the real evidence, Enigma says, an open test of whether distributed human-interaction data validates the interface bet or exposes it as a sidestep of the harder capability problem.