Letter From Our Founders
Tags: Machine Learning, Public Data, Data, Funding, Startup

Today, we’re excited to share news that marks a milestone for our company. We founded Enigma with a mission to empower people to interpret and improve the world around them. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve received $95 million in new funds from a diverse and influential set of investors to continue to work toward that goal. We’ll be using the capital to continue to build and deliver contextual intelligence that transforms how people and organizations make decisions.

When we set off on this journey in 2011, we were struck — and inspired — by the immense, untapped opportunities for real world data. We wanted to make data accessible and help people apply it to make more informed choices. Seven years later, while our focus hasn’t changed, the way the world thinks about data certainly has. More data companies have emerged. Businesses are regularly looking to tap into data to improve their work. People are skeptical of how their own data is being used. Based on the way we’ve observed the use and perceptions of data evolve, we know the work set out for us is more important than ever.

Data has been in the spotlight. Oftentimes, it’s to talk about how we’ve been misled, following a discovery that data has been used to influence social, consumer, or political behaviors. Other times, it’s been because we’re inspired by its use for good — improving our understanding of human health, the environment, and economies. Overwhelmingly, the stories that make the news are the ones about ambitious, innovative, or surprising applications of data — and its subsequent use to power technologies like AI and machine learning — that form our understanding about how data is used today.

But the reality is that this is not representative of most organizations’ experiences with data. The vast majority of organizations are actually leaps away from having the access to, or the fundamental understanding of, the data in their worlds and the ability to take any transformative or trustworthy action off of it. For all the talk from organizations about their ambitions to incorporate artificial intelligence into their businesses, how confident are they in their data’s accuracy to power even their longest-standing workflows? When they do incorporate more data into their work, are they transparent about when and how they do it to be reliable and compliant?

At Enigma, quality, transparency, and privacy are driving principles behind our ambition to create order and impact with data. This plays out across everything we do — uncovering public data, connecting it to build a unified base of knowledge of people, places, and companies, and building transparency by sharing digestible information with the world. As we operate, we not only clean messy, disparate public data, but we also find the connections across datasets to contextualize, streamline information, and deliver holistic, coherent stories. Driven by that mission to improve and interpret, we are committed to dedicating resources and time to Labs that advance academic research and community work. And through our partnerships with clients, we validate and connect their own data to ensure business decisions are rooted in trusted information. To date, we’ve worked with some of the top financial services firms to help combat money laundering and manage all kinds of financial risk, a top healthcare company to improve medical patient safety, and an investment leader to strengthen its portfolio options to better align to the interests of its communities of investors. We’re proud to be equipping all types of organizations and individuals with the building blocks of quality, real world data that prepare them for any grand, future transformations.

So, what’s next for us? We will continue to deliver on our mission by broadening the reach of our data and technology. We’ll do this by building out our knowledge graph, the technology that structures our data assets into linked insights and delivers intelligence to our diverse spectrum of users. We’re ready to push boundaries in fundamental areas of data science research like entity resolution and methods to manage complex ontologies. We’ll organize and connect more data to the base we have, as well as improve the processes we are using to do it and improve the world’s access to it. We’ll explore new use cases across industries not yet served, and discover signal to put new categories of data to work. Of course, a world-class team is what powers any and all of our work, and we’ll be using the funding to expand our talented team over the coming months and years — in NYC and beyond.

We, and our exciting line-up of diverse investors, could not be more ready for the next stage in our journey. Finally, we could not have accomplished this without the help of many along the way, and we are thankful to our employees, clients, partners, and investors for all they have done.

We’re ready to help people and organizations by building a model of the real world for everyone to make smarter, more informed decisions. Cheers to the next phase!

Hicham and Marc