So the concept of big data sounds like a great idea — there are vast stores of information out there just waiting to be used, and we just need something to process it all. But unless you know exactly where to look, it’s difficult to actually find actionable information. More importantly, it’s damn near impossible to cross-reference information from multiple data sets without pulling it and analyzing it yourself.
New York City-based Enigma is trying to help users make sense of it all. And it’s raised $1.1 million in seed funding to get it started. The company, which is still in beta, looks at publicly available and proprietary data sets across multiple providers, including government, real estate and finance records.
So for instance you can do trend analysis across government databases to check out patterns in defense spending, and see who’s winning all the big contracts. Or you can check out how different real estate markets are performing relative to local job numbers, or you can even figure out something as banal as how many bagels are sold in New York versus other markets.
That’s because Enigma has started tracking more than 100,000 different data sets and begun to structure them in a way that makes searching them not only do-able, but useful. And all of it is available in the Enigma dashboard, decoupling the data from obscure sources that it comes from. The company’s relational database makes searching and comparing data sets a breeze.
Now that it’s collected all that data, the company is looking to grow its user base pretty significantly. Since it has such a broad amount of data, the number of applicable use cases is near infinite: It’s looking to pitch companies in media, finance, consulting, legal, and academic industries.
The funding from TriplePoint Capital, Crosslink Capital, early YouTuber Brent Hurley, Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, and Colbeck Capital partner Matthew Glass will help in that pursuit.