This post was first published on Enigma’s blog.
For every business leader trying to size a market or every sales team trying to find the right leads, there’s a frustrating, hidden truth: most business data is a mess.
It exists as flat, disconnected lists. “Mike’s Pizza” in one file has no connection to “Michael’s Pizzeria, Inc.” in another. A brand’s popular online store is treated as a separate entity from its legal registration. It’s chaos, and it forces you to build your strategy on a broken foundation.
At Enigma, we believe this is a solvable problem. But it requires a fundamentally different approach. That’s why we spent the past year rebuilding our entire platform from the ground up.
This post is for those who want to look under the hood. It’s a guide to the architecture that powers the new Enigma platform and how it enables you to see the business world with unprecedented clarity.
Why most business data is broken (and how we built a better foundation)
Most business data platforms are built on a flawed architecture. They treat businesses as simple rows in a spreadsheet, failing to capture the messy, complex reality of how businesses actually operate.
A single business has multiple identities. It’s the brand your customer sees (“Wildflower Goods”), the legal entity on its tax forms (“WF Holdings LLC”), and the network of physical locations where it operates. Without accurately connecting these dots, your data isn’t just incomplete—it’s actively misleading.
This is the foundational problem we solved.
We created the Enigma Identity Graph, a proprietary knowledge graph that organizes the chaotic reality of the business world into a clean, connected map. Instead of just stitching lists together, our graph understands the crucial relationships between entities.
Here’s what that means in practice: When a fintech partner tries to onboard “Wildflower Goods,” our graph instantly and confidently links it to the verified legal entity “WF Holdings LLC.” This is the difference between a stalled application that requires days of manual review and a seamless, automated approval.
It’s an architecture built for clarity, ensuring you have a single, reliable source of truth for every business you interact with.
Capability 1: See the true, holistic picture of every business
Because we built a true identity graph, you can finally connect all the dots. Our platform accurately links parent companies to their brands, franchises to their owners, and DBAs to their legal entities. This is the difference between simply targeting “fast-casual restaurants” and identifying a single, fast-growing chain that’s onboarding dozens of new franchisees. It allows you to understand the true structure of an enterprise opportunity and engage with the right decision-maker.
Capability 2: Discover unfindable markets with semantic search
Because we use semantic embeddings, you can finally find businesses the way you think about them. Your ideal customer profile isn’t a NAICS code. It’s a concept, like “a boutique hotel with a wellness focus” or “family-run hardware stores.” Our new Console allows you to search for businesses with this kind of descriptive, natural language. Our model understands the intent behind your query, surfacing the most relevant businesses, even if they don’t use your exact keywords. This is how you find the niche markets your competitors don’t even know exist.
Capability 3: Access high-fidelity intelligence you can’t get elsewhere
Because our data is precisely linked, you can finally trust high-value signals. Our graph’s accuracy allows us to confidently attach proprietary merchant card revenue data. We can tell you not just that a business exists but what its actual merchant pulse is. With a 70% success rate in estimating card revenues within ±30% of actual values, we provide a verifiable signal of a business’s health that replaces guesswork with ground truth.
Semantic Search in the Enigma Segment Explorer helps you find surprising, emerging, and taxonomy-breaking businesses.
Intelligence where you work: the Console and our APIs
This intelligence is delivered through two powerful interfaces designed for different workflows:
- The Enigma Console: Your interface for human-speed discovery. It’s a sandbox for go-to-market leaders and analysts to explore the business landscape, test hypotheses, and build hyper-targeted lists with an intuitive, self-serve UI.
- Our APIs: Your engine for machine-speed automation. Our GraphQL API allows your developers to retrieve a rich, connected profile of any business in a single, efficient query. Our revamped Know Your Business (KYB) API, powered by Enigma
graph-model-1(now in private preview), provides a turnkey solution to automate and scale your compliance and onboarding workflows. This is how you deliver programmatic insights directly into the tools your teams live in every day.
We didn’t just rebuild our product; we built a new foundation for intelligence about businesses. We invite you to see the difference for yourself.