A company specializing in creating ways to use public data has announced investor funding of $4.5 million.

Enigma takes public data sources, cleans the data and makes it easily accessible and digestible.

It aims to make public data "truly public" - although as it is a subscription service this comes at a cost starting at $195 per month.

Using the Enigma software you can search, discover and analyze public data from over 100,000 data sources. Since Enigma’s public launch in 2013, it has focused on a small number of industry sectors including financial institutions, media, and professional services. This was carried out using the initial funding of $850,000. The new funds will pay for the development of more work on the development of the API, according to Marc DaCosta, cofounder of Enigma.

Data in public sources is imported, cross-referenced and linked by a proprietary relational engine. The data is thoroughly cleansed, linked and geocoded. Enigma also adds ‘context’ around the data, and believes that the systematic linking, alongside the use of heuristics to identify contextual clues, makes the data much more useful for helping data discovery.

Users can search, analyze and export all the data either through a web user interface or the Enigma API. The current RESTful API can be used by developers writing applications and services that rely on public data. The new funding will be used to add more API tools making it easier to incorporate data from Enigma into apps. DaCosta says developer use of Enigma via API has been growing rapidly, and the company plans to create specific graph models based on the data.

The company sees the banking and financial sectors as being a major growth area. Until now hedge funds have made up a major component of the company’s clients, but DaCosta sees credit underwriters as being another potential area.

Enigma offers a 30-day Free Trial that enables you to try a sandboxed version of the API but if you simply want to try its search facility out you can create an account simply by providing an email address.