Enigma

Enigma is a New York-based data company that provides business identity infrastructure built on entity resolution, linking every U.S. business — public and private — to its legal entities, operating locations, ownership, brands, and government records in a unified "business identity graph." The company reports its graph covers more than 100 million registrations, over 30 million brands, and more than 2 billion relationships.^[1][3].

Founded in 2012 by Marc DaCosta and Hicham Oudghiri, the company initially gained recognition for Enigma Public, an open-data platform that was later discontinued, before focusing on commercial applications for banks, payments companies, and fintechs.^[1][2]

What It Does

Enigma combines hundreds of publicly available data sources — including nationwide corporate registration records, Secretary of State filings, IRS records, web crawling, legal filings, card revenue signals, and watchlists — to verify that businesses are active and real, eliminating what it calls "ghost" businesses from customer data.^[1][2]

The same identity resolution layer supports know-your-business (KYB) onboarding pipelines, analyst workflows, and AI agent research through a single query interface.^[1]

Products

Solution areas include Onboarding & KYB for instant business verification; Customer & Transaction Screening for sanctions and risk screening of persons and entities at onboarding and on an ongoing basis; Payment Risk & Underwriting; GTM Solutions for go-to-market teams; and Merchant Transaction Signals, which the company describes as derived from more than 750 million anonymized credit and debit cards representing over 30 billion transactions and $4.5+ trillion dollars annually — used by payments providers to estimate merchant share-of-wallet across competitors' rails.^[1]

Data is delivered via API, including a GraphQL API, with developer documentation and a self-service console.^[1]

Buyers And Use Cases

The company lists Capital One, Chase, Ramp, DoorDash, Alloy, Gusto, Parallel, and Proof among customers or case-study subjects on its homepage. A published case study describes how marketing agency FMCG Direct used Enigma data to help banks identify merchants already processing cards, with reported increases of up to 3x conversions in new merchant services accounts.^[1] Wikipedia notes historical Fortune 500 work including American Express, ADP, BB&T, Celgene, Merck, and PayPal, and use cases spanning financial services compliance, B2B marketing, insurance underwriting, and lending.^[2]

History

Enigma Technologies, Inc. was founded by Marc DaCosta (chairman) and Hicham Oudghiri (CEO), motivated by frustration that public data could not have connected the dots around the 2008 financial crisis. It launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013, winning the event's Startup Battlefield. Funding rounds include a $1.1 million seed in February 2013; a $4.5 million round in early 2014 backed by The New York Times Company, Comcast Ventures, and American Express Ventures; a $28.2 million Series B in June 2015 led by New Enterprise Associates with Two Sigma Ventures; and $95 million announced in September 2018, led by NEA with participation from BB&T, Capital One Growth Ventures, MetLife, and Third Point.^[2]

The company began using knowledge graphs for entity resolution in September 2018, per Wikipedia-cited coverage. Its free open-data service Enigma Public was deactivated on March 24, 2020.^[2]

Landscape

Enigma competes in the KYB and small-business data market alongside firmographic providers and credit bureaus, differentiating on entity resolution depth and proprietary merchant card-spend signals rather than solely on government registry data.^[1][2]