A number of robotics companies are tackling one of AI’s toughest problems: building foundational models capable of performing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle. Their approaches range from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors.

puzzleA research lab that emerged from stealth on Monday is taking a fundamentally different approach. Instead of focusing solely on the model’s capabilities, the less-than-a-year-old startup wants to study how humans interact with robots in hopes that this interaction will lead to intuitive interfaces and, potentially, 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 Gow of Conviction Partners.

To test how humans want to interact with machines, Enigma is launching a large-scale experiment that will allow anyone in the world to interact online with more than 100 of its proprietary AI robots. Housed in hangars in Israel and California, the robots can draw pictures with paintbrushes, fight each other with swords and carry out simple chemistry experiments by lifting and mixing flasks into liquids. Enigma claims to have developed both the robotic arms and their basic models completely from the ground up.

Jonathan Jacoby (pictured right), Microsoft’s youngest-ever employee – recruited during his time with Wiz founder Asaph Rappaport – co-founded Enigma with his longtime friend Gal New (pictured left). The two met as young teenagers participating in hacking competitions, then became close friends while serving together in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, where they researched cyber security.

When Jacobi and Niv set out to launch a startup together last year, they decided to apply their technical skills to AI for robotics, an area where they had no direct experience, but believed to have the most interesting unsolved problems in tech.

He assembled a team that Jacoby describes as some of his “smartest friends” from Israel’s tech ecosystem and community — including alumni from top AI labs, math Olympiad winners, and several people who were convinced to drop out of PhD programs.

“Many insiders in the robotics industry are taking part in the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders — they’re not roboticists. This gives them more room for originality,” said Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. “Someone who is an insider might start with teleoperation capability or expertise, but Enigma is starting from a completely different place: ‘What is the ultimate experience?'”

Jacoby told TechCrunch that Enigma aims to make human-robot interactions completely easy.

“If you have to do your dishes and spend 15 minutes explaining to a robot where to put everything, everyone gets to the point where forget it, I’ll do it myself.,‘” Jacoby said. “Right now, everyone is at that point — even with the most talented models.”

Jacobi believes that manipulative 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 the volume by a set percentage without knowing whether the result would be too loud or too quiet.

Enigma hopes the data gathered from its online experiment will reveal an interface that will become the robotics equivalent of a car volume knob. The startup’s public test will examine different ways people interact with the robot.

“We’re going to learn a lot about the right 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 as a video? Or maybe we want to tap, drag and drop?”

Jacoby admits that the Enigma experience is very revealing. The hope is that by collecting real-world data on human-robot interactions, the startup will discover not only superior interfaces but also better ways to train its underlying AI model.

The company may eventually learn how humans prefer to interact with robots. But so far, its business 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 partnering with companies in healthcare, logistics and entertainment.