Enigmata, Inc. emerged from stealth today with $6.5 million in seed funding led by Blockchange Ventures to commercialize Enigmata Cipher, a patent-pending cryptographic technology that lets artificial intelligence train, search, and analyze data while it remains encrypted. Cipher runs AI directly on encrypted data at production speed, turning locked-away data into fuel for AI.
The world's most valuable data is often the hardest to use. Clinical records that could improve cancer detection, transaction histories that could help stop fraud, and archives that could train more capable models are locked inside institutions that cannot risk exposing them. Cipher gives organizations a way to put that data to work in AI while keeping it protected.
Cryptographers have pursued computation on encrypted data for decades. Existing approaches have historically forced trade-offs among flexibility, performance, and security. Enigmata Cipher takes a different approach designed around speed, cost, and flexibility modern AI workloads require.
Cipher transforms records, documents, and datasets into an encrypted form that AI, analytics, and search tools can use on existing enterprise hardware. Because technology simultaneously structures and encrypts data, it can also improve performance. In internal benchmarks, models trained on Cipher-protected data matched accuracy of models trained on raw data while completing training 8% to 10% faster. Cipher also supports targeted removal of individual records without retraining a model from scratch.
"Every era of computing has forced a choice between using data and protecting it. Enigmata Cipher ends that trade-off," said Scott Searle, co-founder and CEO of Enigmata. "When hospitals, banks, and publishers can safely use their most sensitive assets in AI, we stop asking what AI is allowed to know and start asking what it can safely discover, prevent, and create."
Enigmata's long-term vision is to extend Cipher into infrastructure for secure data licensing. Institutions could make encrypted datasets available for AI training under enforceable usage terms while retaining control of underlying assets. As copyright disputes reshape how AI companies access training data, Cipher could give data owners a way to participate directly in value their data creates.
"Privacy is the next great frontier for AI," said Matt Immerso, general partner at Blockchange Ventures. "Every advance in hardware and models only matters if customers are comfortable putting their most sensitive data into AI. Enigmata built encryption for exactly that, from the ground up."
About Enigmata
Enigmata, Inc. is trust infrastructure for AI data economy. Founded in 2024, built for banks, insurers, health systems, life sciences, publishers, data providers, and model owners with valuable data they cannot safely expose but need to use in AI workflows.
