The four-year-old company has built up gradually, gathering and preparing thousands of government data sets to be searched, sifted and deployed in software applications. But Enigma is embarking on a sizable expansion, planning to nearly double its staff to 60 people by the end of the year. The growth will be fueled by a $28.2 million round of venture funding, led by New Enterprise Associates, that will be announced on Tuesday. (The New York Times Company is among the investors.)

The expansion will be mainly to pursue corporate business. Drew Conway, co-founder of DataKind, an organization that puts together volunteer teams of data scientists for humanitarian purposes, called Enigma “a first version of the potential commercialization of public data.”

Other companies, too, are working to build businesses with the help of open data. The data start-up Reonomy, for example, provides research for the commercial real estate market. Another, Dataminr, is best known for analyzing Twitter feeds, but it also pulls in a lot of open data. Socrata, a Seattle-based start-up, supplies software for data-driven applications in government. Google’s new venture focused on technology for cities, Sidewalk Labs, announced this month, will be mining lots of open data.

Large software and services companies, like IBM and the Silicon Valley start-up Palantir, routinely cull public data in assignments for government and corporate clients. So do suppliers of analytics software, like SAS Institute and Microsoft.

But Enigma, analysts say, appears to occupy a distinctive niche, combining an unusually comprehensive data service of thousands of public data sets and software to help companies manipulate and analyze those data sets.

The goal, said Marc DaCosta, Enigma’s chairman and co-founder, is “to bring open data in as tool of discovery and decision-making, integrated into the day-to-day operations of companies.”