Enigma is a

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

company headquartered in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

that specializes in providing data and intelligence about businesses. The company is mainly known for Enigma Public, a now defunct library of

public data Public data may refer to: *Open data *any data that inadvertently becomes public affecting information privacy Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, ...

. Using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

, the company organizes and connects hundreds of sources to provide data about businesses for customers in a variety of use cases, from

financial services Financial services are the Service (economics), economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, acco ...

compliance to

B2B marketing Business marketing is a marketing practice of individuals or organizations (including commercial businesses, governments and institutions). It allows them to sales, sell products or services to other companies or organizations that resell them, us ...

and

insurance Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...

underwriting Underwriting (UW) services are provided by some large financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and investment houses, whereby they guarantee payment in case of damage or financial loss and accept the financial risk for liabilit ...

and lending. Enigma works with a number of

Fortune 500 The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along ...

companies, including

American Express American Express Company (Amex) is an American multinational corporation specialized in payment card services headquartered at 200 Vesey Street in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The company was found ...

, ADP,

BB&T BB&T Corporation (previously known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company) was one of the largest banking and financial services firms in the United States, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2019, BB&T announced its intentions to merge ...

Celgene Celgene Corporation is a pharmaceutical company that makes cancer and immunology drugs. Its major product is Revlimid ( lenalidomide), which is used in the treatment of multiple myeloma, and also in certain anemias. The company is incorporated in ...

Merck Merck refers primarily to the German Merck family and three companies founded by the family, including: * the Merck Group, a German chemical, pharmaceutical and life sciences company founded in 1668 ** Merck Serono (known as EMD Serono in the Unite ...

, and

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

History

Enigma Technologies, Inc. was founded by Marc DaCosta (Chairman, co-founder) and Hicham Oudghiri (CEO, co-founder). The founders' curiosity was drawn into focus by the 2008 financial crisis and the effects of climate change. They were frustrated that relevant public data was available, and should have shed light on these two occurrences, but the world still struggled to connect the dots to understand how and why these crises happened or to stop both altogether. They sought to make data connected, open, and actionable – and Enigma was born. The company currently has more than 100 employees and is headquartered in NYC's

Silicon Alley Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has ...

. Enigma was launched at the three-day 2013

TechCrunch Disrupt TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

Conference, and was the winner of the event's Startup Battlefield.Dickey, Megan Rose
"This TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Could Be The Future Of Search"
''

Business Insider ''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publ ...

'', May 2, 2013 In February 2013 they announced a $1.1 million seed funding round backed by TriplePoint Capital and Crosslink Capital, among others. This was augmented in early 2014 by a $4.5 million funding round which included additional investors

The New York Times Company The New York Times Company is an American mass media company that publishes ''The New York Times''. Its headquarters are in Manhattan, New York City. History The company was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones in New York City. T ...

Comcast Ventures Comcast Ventures was a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. History In early 2011, Comcast and NBCUniversal combined their two venture arms, Comcast Interactive Capital founded in 1999 and the Peacock Fund, ...

, and

Ventures. In June 2013, the company announced a long-term beta testing partnership with

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, granting full access to their students and academic communities. In October 2013, the company was a finalist in the

NYCEDC New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) is a nonprofit corporation whose stated mission is to "leverage the city’s assets to create beneficial jobs that drive growth. This ensures equitable and sustainable development across al ...

-sponsored "Take the HELM: Hire + Expand in Lower Manhattan" contest, and in June 2014 they were selected as participants in the FinTech Innovation Lab program. In August 2014, Enigma announced that Jeremy Bronfman would step down as CEO and be replaced by Hicham Oudghiri. In June 2015, Enigma secured a $28.2 million Series B funding round led by

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...

(NEA) with participation from

Two Sigma Two Sigma Investments is a New York City-based hedge fund that uses a variety of technological methods, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed computing, for its trading strategies. The firm is run by John Overdec ...

Ventures and New York City Investment Fund, as well as existing investors including American Express Ventures, Comcast Ventures and The New York Times Company. In April 2017, Enigma moved its website to Enigma.com from its previous site, Enigma.io, and ceased referring to itself with the ".io" qualifier. Enigma was named to

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

FinTech 50 List in February 2018. In September 2018, Enigma announced $95 million in new funds to expand its network and platform that connects real-world and enterprise data to power key workflows. Existing investor NEA led this funding, which included new investments from strategic FinTech investors BB&T, Capital One Growth Ventures, MetLife and

Third Point Third Point Management is a New York-based hedge fund founded by Daniel S. Loeb in 1995. The firm operates as an employee-owned and SEC-registered investment advisor with approximately $16 billion in assets under management . As of December ...

along with venture firm Glynn Capital. Early investors Comcast Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, and the Partnership Fund for NYC also participated. This was the inaugural investment for both BB&T and MetLife.

Enigma Public

Enigma Public was a

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business reporting, reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central Repos ...

website which provided an aggregated collection of public

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...

from international

government agencies A government or state agency, sometimes an appointed commission, is a permanent or semi-permanent organization in the machinery of government that is responsible for the oversight and administration of specific functions, such as an administratio ...

, organizations, and businesses. It was at one point the broadest collection of public data that is open and searchable by everyone, and could be accessed through Enigma's web-based

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

, which also provided a collection of

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

tools. Users could register for a free rate-limited account to receive programmatic access via their

web API A web API is an application programming interface for either a web server or a web browser. It is a web development concept, usually limited to a web application's client-side (including any web frameworks being used), and thus usually does not in ...

, while unfettered or commercial access was available for a fee.Singer, Natasha
"A Harvest of Company Details, All in One Basket"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', March 15, 2014 Data republished by Enigma was reusable (with attribution) for free by

journalists A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

, so it was occasionally used as a primary or corroborating source for analyses on everything from

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

aerial surveillanceAldhous, Peter
"Spies in the Skies"
"

BuzzFeed BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Ken ...

", April 6, 2016 to house fire incidentsSwanstrom, Ryan
"Collaboration and Open Data Helping to Prevent House Fires"
"Datakind", October 2, 2015 to U.S. government shipping records. The company redesigned and updated Enigma Public in June 2017 in an effort to make public data more accessible and easy to use. This redesign included features that enabled users to identity connections and interpretations within the data quickly and easily by focusing

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

and linked datasets. The updated platform also curated featured datasets and collections, including those obtained by

Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...

requests. In August 2018, Enigma released a

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

SDK for Enigma Public, designed to make it easier to locate and import public data into a

Jupyter notebook Project Jupyter () is a project with goals to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages. It was spun off from IPython in 2014 by Fernando Pérez and Brian Granger ...

or any other Python project using the Enigma Public API. Enigma Public was deactivated on March 24, 2020.

Enigma Labs

Enigma has built a number of open data tools that serve a public good, called Enigma Labs. Each project sheds light on critical topics of the day and enables and informs civic action. The company's first Lab was launched in October 2013, as a real-tim
visualization
tracking how the

United States federal government shutdown of 2013 From October 1 to October 17, 2013, the United States federal government entered a shutdown and curtailed most routine operations because neither legislation appropriating funds for fiscal year 2014 nor a continuing resolution for the interim ...

impacted employees of every government agency. In 2014, Enigma partnered with the

City of New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans

smoke alarms A smoke detector is a device that senses smoke, typically as an indicator of fire. Smoke detectors are usually housed in plastic enclosures, typically shaped like a disk about in diameter and thick, but shape and size vary. Smoke can be detecte ...

. This project, calle
Smoke Signals
was soon scaled to cities across the United States in partnership with DataKind and the

American Red Cross The American Red Cross (ARC), also known as the American National Red Cross, is a non-profit humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief, and disaster preparedness education in the United States. It is the desi ...

. The tool uses data from the

American Housing Survey The American Housing Survey (AHS) is a statistical survey funded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is the largest regular national housing sample survey in the United ...

and

American Community Survey The American Community Survey (ACS) is a demographics survey program conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census, such as ancestry, citizenship, educati ...

to create a block-level assessment of whether residents are likely to have a working smoke alarm in more than 175 cities in the United States and is available as an interactive map and downloadable CSV files. Cities can also upload their own historical fire incident data to improve the model for their area.

Data

Enigma combines hundreds of public and private sources of data, including

, organizations, and websites, into a single

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

. Enigma has obtained a vast amount of data via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including New York Metropolitan Transit Authority accident reports and a log of all FOIA requests made to the

Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

. Enigma provides free basic firmographic data about millions of U.S. businesses via its

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

Features

Enigma provides access to its data through a web-based

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

and an

. Tools are provided in the interface for performing basic

statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers propertie ...

, such as finding the minimum, maximum or mean value of any numerical data column. For further analysis, users may either use the interface to export data to a

CSV file A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separato ...

or make

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

requests to the provided

. The company also produces interactive data visualizations which provide visual interfaces for particular individual datasets."U.S. Daily Temperature Anomalies 1964-2013"
Accessed July 21, 2014 On May 11, 2016, Enigma announced the launch of ParseKit, now called "Concourse", their proprietary software for ETL and

data integration Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...

, which had been developed internally via

dogfooding Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as qual ...

to acquire their public datasets. In September 2018, Enigma announced its use of

knowledge graph The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance. The data is generated automatically from a variety of so ...

s as the vehicle for ingesting, standardizing, and adapting data from tables into representations of relationships delivered to users. Enigma uses linking, ontology mapping, and entity resolution capabilities to uncover new information about businesses and to deliver linked information through an API. Enigma'
knowledge graphs
integrate

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual-l ...

results, to improve entity resolution.

History

Enigma Public

Enigma Labs

Data

Features

References

Further reading