So many big data and analytics-focused startups are getting funding these
days that I’ve been inspired to compile a second slideshow highlighting these
companies. This new batch has reined in some $250 million this year as they seek
to help organizations make sense of the seemingly endless pool of data going
online.
So many big data and analytics-focused startups are getting funding these days
that I’ve been inspired to compile a second slideshow highlighting these
companies (see “13 Big Data and Analytics Companies to Watch” for the previous
collection). This new batch has reined in some $250 million this year as they
seek to help organizations more easily access and make sense of the seemingly
endless amount of online data.
Alation
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Funding/investors: $9M in Series A funding led by Costanoa Capital and Data
Collective.
Focus: Its data accessibility platform is designed to make information more
usable by the masses across enterprises. The company is led by former Oracle,
Apple, Google and Microsoft engineers and executives, and its on-premises and
virtual private cloud-based offerings promise to help data analysts get in sync,
optimize data across Hadoop and other stores, and ensure data governance. Boasts
customers including eBay and Square.
Aviso
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif. (with operations in India, too)
Funding/investors: $15M in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners and
Next World Capital, bringing total funding to $23M.
Focus: Data science-driven predictive analytics software for sales teams,
including the newly released Aviso Insights for Salesforce. Co-founder and CEO
K.V. Rao previously founded subscription commerce firm Zuora and worked for
WebEx, while Co-founder and CTO Andrew Abrahams was head of quantitative
research and model oversight at JPMorgan Chase. The two met about 20 years ago
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Birst
Founded: 2004
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding/investors: $156M, including a $65M round in March led by Wellington
Management.
Focus: Cloud-based business intelligence and analytics that works across
compliance-sensitive enterprises but also gives end users self-service data
access. This company, formed by a couple of ex-Siebel Analytics team leaders,
has now been around for a while, has thousands of customers and has established
itself as a competitor to big companies like IBM and Oracle. And it has also
partnered with big companies, such as AWS and SAP, whose HANA in-memory database
can now run Birst’s software.
BlueData
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Mountain View
Funding/investors: $39M, including a $20M Series C round led by Intel Capital in
August.
Focus: A founding team from VMware has delivered the EPIC software platform
designed to enable customers to spin up virtual on-premises Hadoop or Spark
clusters that give data scientists easier access to big data and applications.
(We also included this firm in our roundup of hot application container
startups.)
Datameer
Founded: 2009
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding/investors: $76M, including $40M in Series E funding led by ST Telemedia.
Focus: Big data analytics application for Hadoop designed to let any employee
analyze and visualize structured and unstructured data. Counts British Telecom
and Citibank among its customers.
Deep Information Sciences
Founded: 2010
Headquarters: Boston
Funding/investors: $18M, including an $8M Series a round in April led by Sigma
Prime Ventures and Stage 1 Ventures.
Focus: The company’s database storage engine employs machine learning and
predictive algorithms to enable MySQL databases to handle big data processing
needs at enterprise scale. Founded by CTO Thomas Hazel, a database and
distributed systems industry veteran.
Looker
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Santa Cruz
Funding/investors: $48M, including a $30M B round in March led by Meritech
Focus: Web-based business intelligence platform that provides access to data
whether in a database or the cloud. A modeling language called LookML enables
analysts to create interfaces end users can employ for dashboard or to drill
down and really analyze data. Founded by CTO Lloyd Tabb, a one-time principal
engineer at Netscape, where he worked on Navigator and Communicator. Looker
claims to have Etsy, Uber and Yahoo among its customers.
Maana
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Palo Alto
Funding: $14M, including $11M in Series A funding in May, with backers including
Chevron Technology Ventures and Intel Capital.
Focus: Semantic search engine that plows through big data from multiple sources
and delivers information in a way that can be consumed by line-of-business
application users. The company announced in June that its platform is now
powered by Apache Spark. Co-founder Donald Thompson spent 15 years prior to
launching Maana in top engineering and architect jobs at Microsoft, including on
the Bing search project.
RapidMiner
Founded: 2007
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
Funding/investors: $20M, including $15M in Series B funding led by Ascent
Venture Partners.
Focus: This company, which got its start in Germany under founder Ingo Mierswa,
offers an open source-based predictive analytics platform for business analysts
and data scientists. The platform, available on-premises or in the cloud, has
been upgraded of late with new security and workflow capabilities. Peter Lee, a
former EVP at Tibco, took over as CEO in June.
Reltio
Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Redwood Shores, Calif.
Funding/investors: $10M in Series A funding in March, from Crosslink Capital and
.406 Ventures.
Focus: The team behind Informatica/Siperian MDM started Reltio, which offers
what it calls data-driven applications for sales, marketing, compliance and
other users, as well as a cloud-based master data management platform. The
company claims its offerings break down silos between applications like CRM and
ERP to give business users direct access to and control over data.
Sensai
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Palo Alto
Funding/investors: $900K in seed funding from investors including Andreessen
Horowitz and Formation8.
Focus: A “data science platform for the unstructured world.” Sensai’s offering
makes it possible to quantify and analyze textual information, such as from news
articles and regulatory filings. The company is focused initially on big
financial firms, like UBS, though also has tech giant Siemens among its earlier
customers. Two of Sensai’s co-founders come from crowdfunding company
Spare5
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Seattle
Funding/investors: $13.25M, including a $10M Series A round led by Foundry
Group, New Enterprise Associates and Madrona Venture Group
Focus: This iPhone app enables businesses to tap into smartphone users (or
“Fives”) to clean up big data in their spare time for a little spare cash. The
idea is that computing power alone can’t be counted on to crunch and analyze big
data. Micro-tasks include everything from SEO-focused photo tagging to
conducting surveys.
Treasure Data
Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Mountain View
Funding/investors: $23M, including $15M in January in Series B funding led by
Scale Venture Partners.
Focus: Provides cloud services designed to simplify the collection, storage and
analysis of data, whether from mobile apps, Internet of Things devices, cloud
applications or other sources of information. This alternative to Hadoop
platforms and services handles some 22 trillion events per year, according to
the company, which has a presence not just in Silicon Valley, but in Japan and
South Korea as well.
