Multiple robotics companies are working on one of AI's most difficult challenges: creating foundation models that can perform tasks they were never explicitly trained to do. Their methods vary widely, from analyzing millions of web videos and running computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans wearing sensor-equipped gloves.
Enigma, a research lab that will come out of stealth on Monday, is pursuing a fundamentally different strategy. Instead of concentrating solely on model capabilities, the less than one year old startup wants to examine how humans engage with robots. The hope is that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and potentially a new type of robotic brain.
To support its mission, Enigma raised a $70 million seed round. Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital led the investment, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.
A large scale experiment
To explore how humans want to communicate with machines, Enigma is launching a large scale experiment. Anyone in the world can interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots. These robots are housed in hangars in Israel and California. They can perform tasks like drawing pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and carrying out simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks containing liquids. Enigma says it developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from scratch.
The founders and their team
Jonathan Jacobi, who was Microsoft's youngest ever employee and was recruited by Wiz founder Asaf Rappaport during his time there, co founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv. The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teenagers. They later became close friends while serving together in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research.
When Jacobi and Niv decided to launch a startup together last year, they chose to apply their technical skills to AI for robotics. They had no direct experience in the field, but they believed it contained the most exciting unsolved problems in technology.
They assembled a team that Jacobi describes as some of their "smartest friends" from Israel's tech ecosystem and community. The group includes alumni 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 participating in the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders. They are not roboticists. It affords them more room for originality," said Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures. "Someone who is an insider may start with the capability of teleoperation or dexterity, but Enigma is starting from a very different place: 'What is the ultimate experience?'"
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Making robot control effortless
Jacobi told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human robot interactions completely effortless.
"If you had to do your dishes and spent 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put everything, everyone reaches the point of 'Forget it, I will just do it myself,'" Jacobi said. "Right now, everyone is at that point, even with the most capable models."
Jacobi believes manipulating robots should eventually be as intuitive as adjusting a car's volume knob. Users would be frustrated, he argues, if instead of turning a dial, they had to adjust volume by set percentages without knowing if the result would end up too loud or too quiet.
Enigma hopes that data gathered from its online experiment will reveal an interface that becomes the robotics equivalent of the car volume knob. The startup's public test will evaluate different ways for people to communicate with its robots.
"We are going to learn a lot about what is the right way to interact with robots," Jacobi said. "Do we want to just talk to them over text or audio? Do we want to show them an example as a video? Or maybe do we want to tap, drag, and drop?"
Jacobi admits that Enigma's experiment is very open ended. The hope is that by gathering real world data on human robot interaction, the startup will discover not only superior interfaces, but better ways to train its foundational AI model.
The company might eventually figure out how humans prefer to communicate with robots. But for now, its business use case remains an enigma in its own right. While Jacobi declined to share specific use cases for Enigma's AI, he said that the startup is already partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment.