He joined Check Point at 16. Now Jonathan Jacobi has raised one of Israel’s biggest seed rounds to build the AI brain for robots
The 26-year-old Enigma co-founder, who later became the youngest employee in the history of Microsoft and Check Point, has raised $71 million to develop the AI models and software that could turn robots into adaptable, intelligent machines.
When Jonathan Jacobi joined Check Point at the age of 16, he was already considered one of the most unusual talents to emerge from Israel’s technology ecosystem.
A decade later, the 26-year-old entrepreneur has raised one of the largest Seed rounds in Israeli startup history, betting that the next major shift in artificial intelligence will not happen on screens, but in the physical world.
Jacobi’s startup, Enigma, founded with Gal Niv, emerged from stealth with a $71 million Seed investment led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Conviction Partners and technology leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines, xAI and Cognition. Among the Israeli investors backing the company are Dazz founder Merav Bahat and Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport.
The company is developing what it calls the intelligence layer for robots: AI foundation models that allow robots to better understand their environment, software that can adapt those models across different machines, and interfaces designed to make robots easier for people to operate.
The funding is an unusually large bet on a company that was founded less than a year ago. But it is also a bet on Jacobi himself, a founder whose career has been shaped by a series of early achievements that made him one of Israeli technology’s most closely watched young talents.
Jacobi began studying computer science and mathematics at the age of 13 and became the youngest employee in the history of both Check Point and Microsoft. Even before joining the Israel Defense Forces, he was involved in cybersecurity research and helped establish Perfect Blue, a cyber competition team that later became the world's top-ranked group in international hacking competitions.
After serving in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite cyber intelligence unit, Jacobi joined cybersecurity startup Dazz, which was later acquired by Wiz. He left the company last year to establish Enigma together with his longtime collaborator Niv.
Niv, Enigma’s CTO, brings a similarly unusual background. He began experimenting with hardware hacking at age 10, started working at a cybersecurity startup at 17, and during his service in Unit 8200 led advanced research and development projects in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. He became the youngest Cyber Operations Director in the unit’s history.
The pair first met during their service in 8200, where they worked on complex technology challenges before turning their attention to what they believe will become the next major computing platform: physical AI.
"AI’s next chapter is moving beyond chatbots and screens into systems that can understand, adapt to and operate in the physical world," Jacobi said when announcing the company.
The rise of generative AI has transformed software, but translating that intelligence into the physical world remains one of the industry's biggest unsolved challenges.
Despite decades of robotics research and billions of dollars of investment, most robots today remain highly specialized machines that require extensive customization, manual data collection and significant engineering effort.
Enigma is attempting to solve that problem by developing AI models that can serve as a foundation layer across different robots and environments, rather than building a robot designed for a single task.
The company's goal is not only to make robots more capable, but also to make them intuitive enough that ordinary users can interact with them.
"No matter how good robots get, if they aren't intuitive enough, not enough people will use them," Jacobi said.
Despite being less than a year old, Enigma has already assembled a team drawn from artificial intelligence, mathematics, physics, cybersecurity and robotics.
The company has recruited researchers and engineers from leading AI labs, elite technological programs, 8200 research units, and academic backgrounds including advanced mathematics and artificial intelligence research. Some team members left PhD programs and research tracks to join the startup.
"The future of AI is not only about what intelligence can do on a screen," Jacobi said. "It is about bringing that intelligence into the real world."
