Print“Ayasdi lets you find the needle in a haystack you didn't know was there, quickly.”
Startup Ayasdi has raised $30.6 million in a series B venture financing to refine and expand its big data platform to sectors beyond life sciences and the defense industries.
Institutional Venture Partners led the investment with participation by Citi Ventures, GE Ventures, and existing investors Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
The startup, based in Palo Alto, California, says it can make sense of reams of data for every industry not by asking the right questions, but by using a branch of mathematics called topology data analysis to discover insights. And you don’t have to be a math whiz to use the platform.
In the six month since its initial launch, it has lined up an impressive list of customers and collaborators in life sciences including U.S. government agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; academic institutions such as the University of California, San Francisco, Mount Sinai Hospital, Texas A&M University, and Harvard Medical School; and drug developers such as Merck and BN Immunotherapeutics. GE and Citigroup have also recently signed up to use Ayasdi’s services. And its first customer was the U.S. intelligence agency Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which is using the platform to help it prevent terrorist attacks.
The technology was developed by Ayasdi co-founders Gunnar Carlsson, CEO Gurjeet Singh, and Harlan Sexton, vice president of research, at Stanford with funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Ayasdi’s technology “is the key to unlocking some of the biggest national security challenges that we face today,” says former DARPA director Tony Tether.
As data gathering has increased, gleaning useful insights from the exponential growth of data has become a huge stumbling block for companies. Unlike some big data infrastructures that require the right questions to be asked in order to elucidate relevant insights, Ayasdi’s platform uses topological data analysis to make a visual map to see correlations. Combined with advanced machine learning techniques and proprietary algorithms, the platform maps entire datasets to provide relevant and statistically valid insights.
“Through powerful analytic models developed over a decade at Stanford, Ayasdi lets you find the needle in a haystack you didn't know was there, quickly,” says Jonathan Ballon, chief strategy officer at GE. “For GE and our customers with vast amounts of industrial data, Ayasdi's technology will be a powerful tool for predictive analytic models that can drive billions of productivity and efficiency savings.”
The new funding will be used to accelerate the development of machine learning systems and topological data analysis-based approaches to speed the discovery of insights from complex data to a matter of seconds, enhance the platform’s integration into core enterprise IT environments and business operations, and provide access to preloaded public datasets that can be paired with proprietary datasets. The company also expects to double its size within the next year.
July 17, 2013
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-ayasdi_raises_30_6_million_for_big_data_platform.html
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