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

Many robotics companies are tackling one of AI’s toughest problems: building basic models capable of performing tasks they haven’t been explicitly trained to handle. Their methods run the gamut, from studying millions of web videos and running computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks wearing gloves using built-in sensors.

Enigma, a research laboratory set to emerge from obscurity on Monday, is taking a radically different approach. Instead of focusing solely on the model’s capabilities, the just-a-year-old startup wants to study how humans interact with robots in the hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and perhaps a different kind of robotic brain.

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

To test how humans communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that allows anyone in the world to interact online with more than 100 of its AI robots. These robots, housed in hangars in Israel and California, can perform tasks such as drawing pictures with paintbrushes, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemistry experiments by picking up vials and mixing them with liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both its robotic arms and its basic models entirely from the ground up.

Jonathan Jacoby (pictured right), Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee – hired by Waze founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there – co-founded Enigma with his old friend Gal Niv (pictured left). The two met while competing in hacking competitions as teenagers, then became close friends while serving together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.

When Jacoby and Nev set out to launch a startup together last year, they decided to apply their technical prowess to artificial intelligence for robotics, an area in which they lacked direct experience but which they believed had the most exciting unsolved problems in technology.

They have assembled a team of what Jacobi calls some of their “smartest friends” from Israel’s tech ecosystem and society — including graduates from top AI labs, Math Olympiad winners, and several people who were convinced to drop out of PhD programs.

“There are a lot of robotics industry insiders involved in the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders — they’re not roboticists,” said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. “This gives them more room for originality.” “A knowledgeable person might start with telecommuting or dexterity, but Enigma starts from a completely different place: ‘What is the ultimate experience?’”

Jacobi told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human-robot interaction completely easy.

“If you have to wash your dishes and you spend 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put everything, everyone will get to the ‘Forget it, I’ll do it myself’ stage.”,“Right now, everyone is at this point — even with the most capable models,” Jacoby said.

Jacobi believes that interacting with robots should eventually be as intuitive as adjusting the volume knob in a car. He argues that users would feel frustrated if, instead of turning a dial, they had to adjust the volume by specific percentages without knowing whether the result would end up being too loud or too quiet.

Enigma hopes that data collected from its online trial will reveal an interface that becomes the automated equivalent of a car volume knob. The startup’s public test will evaluate different ways people can communicate with its robots.

“We will learn a lot about the correct way to interact with robots,” Jacoby said. “Do we want to just talk to them via text or audio? Do we want to show them an example like a video? Or maybe we want to click, drag and drop?”

Jacobi admits that the Enigma experiment is very open-ended. The hope is that by collecting real-world data on human-robot interaction, the startup will not only discover superior interfaces, but better ways to train its underlying AI model.

The company may eventually discover how humans prefer to communicate with robots. But for now, the commercial use case remains a mystery in itself. While Jacoby declined to share specific use cases for Enigma’s AI, he said the startup is already collaborating with companies in healthcare, logistics and entertainment.