The AI robotics company is betting that easier human-robot interaction, not just smarter models, is the main bottleneck to broader deployment, using a public experiment with more than 100 robots in California and Israel.
Enigma, an AI robotics company founded 11 months ago, has completed a $71 million seed funding round co-led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Conviction Partners also participated, alongside individual investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Cognition, and Wiz. The company said it has built more than 100 in-house robot systems operating in California and Israel and is using them in a live public experiment at robots.online, where users can interact with the robots in real time through text, voice, video demonstrations, and tap-and-drag gestures. Enigma argues that the main barrier to wider robotics adoption is not raw capability but the difficulty of making robots intuitive for ordinary users to direct. It says the experiment also serves as a way to collect large volumes of human-robot interaction data that can be used to train its proprietary AI models. The company has confirmed partnerships in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment, and said the new capital will go toward research, engineering, compute infrastructure, and broader real-world deployments.