Enigma raises $70M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume
The massive seed round was led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo's Conviction Partners. Multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI's hardest problems: building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle. Their approaches run the gamut - from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors.
Key Takeaways
- Enigma , a research lab set to emerge from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different approach.
Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain.
- Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from the ground up.
Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft's youngest-ever employee - recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there - co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left).
- It affords them more room for originality," said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures.
"Someone who's an insider may start with the capability of teleoperation or dexterity, but Enigma is starting from a very different place: 'What's the ultimate experience?
- " 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.
- Do we want to show them an example as a video?
Stats & Key Facts
- #To finance its mission, Enigma raised a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners.
Enigma , a research lab set to emerge from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain. To finance its mission, Enigma 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 want to 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 proprietary AI robots. These robots, housed in hangars located in Israel and California, can perform tasks such as drawing pictures with a paintbrush, fighting each other with swords, and performing simple chemistry experiments by picking up and mixing flasks with liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their underlying models entirely from the ground up.
Jonathan Jacobi (pictured right), Microsoft's youngest-ever employee - recruited by Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport during his time there - co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal Niv (pictured left). The two met while competing in hacking competitions as young teens, then became close friends while serving together in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they conducted cybersecurity research. When Jacobi and Niv set out to launch a startup together last year, they decided to apply their technical prowess to AI for robotics, a field where they lacked direct experience, but one they believed held the most exciting unsolved problems in tech.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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