Officials in New Orleans were well aware of the risks posed
in homes without smoke detectors, and had a program to give them free to anyone
who asked. But that clearly was not working. So after the Broadmoor fire, city
officials decided to try to a new approach — targeted outreach to install smoke
detectors in the homes most at risk. To help pick the homes for the
installation, they turned to a New York start-up, Enigma.io, a specialist
in the field of open data, which involves collecting, curating and mining
public government information for insights.
A small team from Enigma worked with New Orleans analysts,
poring over city demographic, building and fire reports going back years. In
March, the city announced a data-guided, door-to-door smoke alarm initiative,
focused on higher-risk homes. Factors associated with higher risk included
poverty, the age of the house and the presence of young children or very old
residents.
The New Orleans job was a pro bono project for Enigma, but
one that demonstrated the sorts of insights that can be pulled out of open
data. The young company and a handful of others like it are betting the same
will increasingly prove to be true in the corporate world. Open data, as a
philosophy and a practice, has been animated by a sense of civic activism —
that transparency will yield social benefits. The Obama administration endorsed
the concept in 2009 when it introduced data.gov, a website providing access to
federal government data sets. Many state and city governments took similar
steps, as did governments around the world.
This new breed of open data companies represents the next
step, pushing the applications into the commercial mainstream. Already, Enigma
is working on projects with a handful of large corporations for analyzing
business risks and fine-tuning supply chains — business that Enigma says
generates millions of dollars in revenue.
The four-year-old company has built up gradually, gathering
and preparing thousands of government data sets to be searched, sifted and
deployed in software applications. But Enigma is embarking on a sizable
expansion, planning to nearly double its staff to 60 people by the end of the
year. The growth will be fueled by a $28.2 million round of venture funding,
led by New Enterprise Associates, that will be announced on Tuesday.
The expansion will be mainly to pursue corporate business. Large software and services companies, like
IBM and the Silicon Valley start-up Palantir, routinely cull public data in
assignments for government and corporate clients. So do suppliers of analytics
software, like SAS Institute and Microsoft. But Enigma, analysts say, appears
to occupy a distinctive niche, combining an unusually comprehensive data
service of thousands of public data sets and software to help companies
manipulate and analyze those data sets.
Hicham Oudghiri, a co-founder of Enigma, demonstrated an
application of his company’s service during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference
in 2013. The goal, said Marc DaCosta, Enigma’s chairman and co-founder, is to
bring open data in as tool of discovery and decision-making, integrated into
the day-to-day operations of companies.
For about a year, Enigma has been working with the
pharmaceutical maker Merck to help fine-tune its supply chain and manufacturing
operations. Enigma’s technology has been used to collect contract and tender
information, especially from single-payer national health systems. Websites and
online documents are scraped to give Merck a sharper global view of demand.
Enigma was born of the challenges of working with open data
experienced by its founders, Mr. DaCosta and Hicham Oudghiri, Enigma’s chief
executive, former roommates at Columbia University. Years later, they both
found themselves grappling with data-driven projects — climate mapping for Mr.
DaCosta and sustainable finance for Mr. Oudghiri. The open data movement was
getting underway, creating lots of raw data in need of refinement.
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