Enigma emerged from stealth at 13:05 UTC on 27 July with a $71 million seed round — one of the largest seeds ever raised for robot foundation models, by a company less than a year old with no product on the market.
Who is behind it
The round is co-led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction — Sarah Guo's fund — and individual angels who work at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition and Wiz. Founders Jonathan Jacobi (chief executive) and Gal Niv both came out of Israel's Unit 8200; Jacobi was reportedly Microsoft's youngest-ever employee. The $71 million is the company's total capital raised to date.
The unusual part
Enigma put more than 100 of its own robots, in hangars in Israel and California, online for the public to control in real time. The demonstrations are deliberately whimsical — painting, sword-fighting, mixing flasks. The pitch is that controlling a robot should be as easy as adjusting a volume dial.
What is not being said
No valuation was disclosed by anyone, so any figure attached to this round is unsourced. The claim of the "world's first interactive AI robots online" is company marketing in the release, not an established first. The angels are individuals who happen to work at frontier labs — coverage describing this as OpenAI or DeepMind investing is wrong. And one outlet's own URL says $70 million where the release says $71 million. The named target sectors — healthcare, logistics, entertainment — carry no customers and no figures.
Why put the robots online at all
Because robot foundation models are bottlenecked on interaction data, and interaction data is expensive to collect. Every member of the public who logs in to make a robot paint something is generating a labelled episode of a human deciding what a robot should do next. The demo is the product's data pipeline wearing a costume — which is a genuinely clever answer to the hardest problem in the field, and also the reason a pre-product company can justify a $71 million seed.