Two friends who met at hacking competitions as teenagers have raised 71 million dollars (around 62 million euros) for a lab less than a year old. The round is led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo of Conviction Partners. The company is called Enigma and until Monday it operated in stealth.

Jonathan Jacobi, the youngest employee in Microsoft's history, and his long-time friend Gal Niv met at hacking contests and then served together in Israel's elite Unit 8200, where they worked on cybersecurity research. When they decided to found a company, they chose robotics - a field in which they had no direct experience whatsoever.

That is not modesty, it is part of the pitch, and the investors say so openly. „There are plenty of robotics insiders participating in the next wave of embodied intelligence, but Jonathan and Gal are outsiders - they are not roboticists. That leaves them more room for originality,” says Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures.

The difference in approach is real. Other firms teach robots from millions of internet videos, from computer simulations, or from sensor gloves that record how a human grips an object. Enigma starts at the other end: not what the robot can do, but how a human wants to talk to it.

To find that out, the lab is putting over 100 of its own robots, housed in hangars in Israel and California, online for anyone in the world to access. The robots paint with a brush, fight each other with swords and perform simple chemistry experiments by mixing liquids in flasks. Both the arms and the models, the company says, were built from scratch.

Jacobi explains the goal with the image of a car's volume knob. „If you have to do the dishes and spend 15 minutes explaining to the robot where to put everything, everyone reaches the moment of 'Fine, I will do it myself',” he says. „Right now everyone is at that point - even with the most capable models.” The question the lab is asking is whether you talk to the robot, show it a video, or drag your finger across a screen.

The trouble with an experiment like this is that it is open at both ends: you collect data, but you do not know in advance what you will find. Jacobi does not hide that. Nor does he say what exactly the product will be for - only that they are already working with companies in healthcare, logistics and entertainment. So: 71 million for a question that still has no answer, and that is enough to close a round at this stage of the market. Balkan founders who spend years chasing a first round with a finished product and paying customers can do their own maths on what a network of contacts is worth.