This TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Could Be The Future Of Search
Enigma aims to make sorting through public data a breeze. It pulls info from over 100,000 data sources and finds connections between them. Think SEC filings, state and federal records, lists of frozen assets, and even CrunchBase.
If you search "Google," for example, Enigma brings up a list of databases including granted patents, H-1B Visa applications, and SEC filings. If you click H-1B visa applications, you can see every application Google filed and drill it down to see only software engineers. From there, you can quickly see that the U.S. Department of Labor certified 471 of Google's applications for software engineers.
Sure, the data is already out there, but it's not easily accessible. The founders also maintain that it's hard to see the connections between those sources of public data.
Enigma seems a lot like Recorded Future, the data startup with $20 million of funding from investors like Google Ventures and the venture arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel. Both companies are aiming to make it easier to sift through and find correlations between publicly available data.
"At a very macro level, Enigma is working the same business problem: gaining insight for business decisions from public, open source information," RecordedFuture VP of Product Matt Kodama tells Business Insider. "Enigma and Recorded Future are working to harness different kinds of public information to that end, and that's a really critical distinction that will flow all the way through our respective products."
Already, Enigma has raised $1.45 million in seed funding, and has partnered with Harvard Business School, research firm Gerson Lehrman Group, S&P Capital IQ, and the New York Times.
Past TechCrunch Disrupt NY winners include Soluto, Getaround, and UberConference. All three of those startups have fared pretty well, but none are runaway successes, at least not yet.
- Soluto, the winner of Disrupt's inaugural event in New York in 2010, has raised $18 million in funding to continue offering support tools to small businesses for managing and fixing their PCs. Just last month, it introduced a new service to support small businesses with up to 10 PCs.
- Getaround, a peer-to-peer car rental startup, has raised $19 million to date from investors including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Collaborative Fund, Menlo Ventures, and CrunchFund. It's still a relatively young company but is definitely a rising star in the "sharing economy."
- UberConference, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, has done pretty well. Earlier this year, it partnered with billion-dollar startup Evernote to share notes in conference calls.
Still, TechCrunch Disrupt, formerly known as TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50, has produced some successful startups over the years:
- Redbeacon won the top prize at TechCrunch 50 in 2009, went on to raise $7.4 million, and then sold to Home Depot for an undisclosed amount.
- GroupMe, a group messaging app that came to fruition during a hackathon at Disrupt NY 2010, got snapped up by Skype for north of $43 million.