Enigma emerged from stealth on July 27, 2026, announcing a $71 million seed round and the launch of what it calls the world’s first live public interactive AI robots experience at www.robots.online. The San Francisco-based startup, founded less than a year ago by Jonathan Jacobi — described in the release as the youngest-ever employee at Microsoft — and Gal Niv, says it builds the intelligence layer that lets real robots act and be used more naturally.
## Funding and founders behind Enigma
The seed round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and industry leaders associated with OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition and Wiz, among others. Enigma surfaced from stealth with the stated aim of pairing advanced robotics models with user interfaces and robot-agnostic software to reduce the engineering overhead typically needed to deploy robots in the physical world.
## What Enigma’s technology does
Enigma says it trains foundation models for robotics that make robots intelligent on varied hardware and in diverse settings. According to the company, its approach lowers the need for large-scale manual data collection while maintaining reliability in physical environments. It emphasizes both capability and usability, developing AI models alongside novel interfaces so robots can be “intuitive to use,” a priority highlighted by co-founder and CEO Jonathan Jacobi.
## Interactive AI robots: a live demo
Later the same day, Enigma opened access to a public demo at robots.online, enabling anyone, anywhere, to interact with real AI-powered robots in real time. The company presents this as the first live public interactive AI robots experience, allowing observers and users to test robot behaviors and interfaces remotely.
## Why this matters for robotics
The company frames its product against persistent industry challenges: despite rapid AI advances, making systems operate reliably in the physical world often requires heavy customization, manual data labeling and significant engineering. Investors poured more than $40 billion into robotics in 2025, and humanoid robots alone are projected by some market analyses to become a multi-trillion-dollar category — a scale that, Enigma argues, will only be realized if robots become easier to deploy and to use.
Enigma positions itself as a platform that pairs adaptable models with software that can be applied across different robots and tasks, aiming to remove much of the traditional complexity of robotic deployment. The startup’s public demo and
