Enigma Emerges from Stealth: Our Investment in JJ and Gal

At 2 a.m. on a warm spring night last year, outside the McKittrick Hotel, we shook hands on an investment with Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv. We’d spent all day together — meeting at sunrise for a walk in Central Park, walks on the Highline, lunch in Meatpacking, capping things off with an epic close up magic show in the best speakeasy in Chelsea. We hadn’t spent a single second talking numbers, and their company wasn’t even incorporated yet. But based on the connection we found, numbers were an afterthought.

JJ and Gal are longtime friends who met as bunkmates in Unit 49, an elite subunit of Israel’s well-known 8200 section. JJ started college at 13 and, as a teenager, became the youngest-ever employee at Microsoft. Gal began experimenting with hardware hacking at age 10, finished four years of university in one year, and got a job at a cybersecurity startup at 17. As a result, they are easily recognizable as superlearners. They’ve worked with and for many people close to Index (Assaf, Roy, and Ami from Wiz, Tomer and Merav from Dazz), all of whom describe them as fierce competitors and execution machines.

Working with JJ and Gal over the past year, I’ve been impressed just how much they improve week over week. We often coach founders on the importance of storytelling. It’s a true craft that requires a variety of abilities — to listen, to synthesize, to communicate. Many technical founders are dismissive because they don’t see the determinism and utility, but JJ has become a student of the craft. That curiosity and willingness to embrace new disciplines, paired with his and Gal’s relentlessness and responsiveness to customer demand — the marker of any great technology company — gives me confidence they can accomplish anything they set their minds to.

In a matter of months, they’ve assembled one of the strongest groups of AI talent anywhere, with some of the most sought-after researchers and engineers in AI, mathematics, physics, cybersecurity, and robotics. Their team includes folks who have turned down offers from the world’s leading AI labs and tech companies, and others who have left prestigious PhD programs and advanced research tracks for the chance to join JJ and Gal on their mission.

Which leads me to today’s news and what JJ and Gal are building at Enigma. The conventional approach in venture is to find technical founders solving technical problems. What I admire about JJ and Gal is that they want to solve a human problem. While the robotics industry has spent decades asking how capable a machine can be, JJ and Gal are asking what it should feel like to be in the room with one. The inversion drives a different starting point that leads to different prioritization of research objectives, approaches to data, and discovery of capabilities.

As Enigma emerges from stealth, we’re excited to lead their $71 million seed round, to welcome our friend Micky from Ribbit Capital, and to support JJ and Gal as they bring a fundamentally new approach to the way humans interact with intelligent machines.