Talk about great timing: Over the past month, Enigma has become the go-to app for people to share and search for mysterious videos. Drones are causing floods in the Northeast the sky
The New York-based company has many similarities Popular App Citizen: Enigma invites users to post video of what they are watching and provide the location of where they are watching it.
and as government officials be afraid In keeping with what’s going on in New Jersey, New York and elsewhere, the app has garnered nearly one million downloads; A spokesperson for the company said that the total number of videos uploaded has increased by 74% in the last month alone.
“People are seeing things and are scared and they don’t know where to send it,” said company spokeswoman Christine Kim. “We’re trying to create a space and community for people to discuss and talk about it.”
The Enigma update also uses the terminology “unknown anomalous events”. (UAP) instead of UFOs, which people have come to associate with flying saucers and little green men.
“We’re normalizing the behavior of watching something and talking about it,” says Kim.
In an effort to weed out fraud, Enigma has a human employee who reviews all videos before they are allowed to be posted on the app.
The company, which launched last year on the Lower East Side, is emerging at a time when whistleblowers suggest something may be going on there. Last month, former government Testified at congressional hearing The Pentagon is not fully disclosing what it knows about the foreign planes it has recovered.
Merchant Marine Capt. Paul Spreiser, 56, who lives in North Bergen, NJ, downloaded the app after he started seeing orange spheres resembling UAPs floating in the sky last month.
“It validates what you’re seeing… you can [communicate with] Other people who are posting videos of the same thing… it’s great to have a dialogue about it,” he explains.
Enigma, whose employees come from major companies like Meta, American Express and trendy startup Tia, has raised funding from some of the biggest names in venture capital, including a16z and Kindred Ventures (the amount was not disclosed). The company is pre-revenue – meaning it focuses on growing before trying to make money.
Enigma, meanwhile, has a mystery of its own: its founder remains anonymous and goes by only the initial “A.” Whoever he is, it’s possible that all this information collected by the app could get him into the right hands. NYNext is reported as “A” Met with the team that compiled a report about UAPs for NASA that was released last year. Although the company has no government contracts to date, “A” said it “talks regularly, informally, with government people.”
this is part of the story NYNext, a new editorial series Which highlights New York City’s innovations as well as leading figures across a variety of industries.