**Enigma is a data company**. It focuses on ingesting large quantities of publicly available databases to extract insights about companies, places, and trends.
As a design co-founder, I was responsible for product management and the design for the product, internal tools, and website.
During my tenure (2011 → 2014), we took the product from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a full-feature public data exploration tool and API, with paying customers.
Governments generate enormous amounts data, and are required by law (in the United Sates, at least) to release records if requested by their citizens. Those records are not readily accessible — they are trapped in messy portals, static databases and antiquated formats.
You can't look for public data sources unless you know what you're looking for. Uncovering the public data about to a company, a place or a government body involves painstaking detective work.
Public data sources cannot talk to each other. A lot of time and energy is spent on testing simple hypotheses that span across datasets.
Since its inception, Enigma was ingesting thousands of large datasets. Managing, searching, and inspecting them was painful. Off-the-shelf tools did not offer a comprehensive and web-accessible package for us to use. Data Explorer, Enigma's first product, was born out of that need.
The earliest iteration of Data Explorer - quite the looker!
Data Explorer served 3 purposes: