Ayasdi has raised USD30.6m in series B venture funding, led by IVP with participation from Citi Ventures, GE Ventures, and existing investors Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
In conjunction with the financing, Steve Harrick from IVP will join Ayasdi’s board of directors.
Six months after the company’s initial launch, Ayasdi’s customers and collaborators include General Electric, Citigroup, Merck, Anadarko, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Mount Sinai Hospital, Texas A&M University, and Harvard Medical School.
Ayasdi has also formed strategic alliances with Cloudera and Pivotal — a joint venture between EMC and VMWare.
“The Big Data market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years and the new frontier will be pioneered by the technologies that leverage the strengths of both humans and machines,” says Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP. “In a remarkably short time, Ayasdi has not only developed a breakthrough technology, but also gained an impressive foothold in the market. I am looking forward to working with their leadership team to build upon that momentum and pursue the company’s next stage of growth.”
Before Ayasdi, organisations typically extract value from data by building a Big Data infrastructure and employing large teams of highly trained data scientists who spend months, and sometimes years, asking questions of data to find breakthrough insights. The probability of discovering these insights is low because there are too many questions to ask and not enough data scientists to ask them. Once found, deploying solutions to help enterprises solve critical problems can further lengthen the process.
Ayasdi’s Insight Discovery platform is designed for domain experts and business people to automatically find insights from complex data and operationalize them to help enterprises solve difficult and expensive problems. Ayasdi’s approach combines advanced machine learning techniques with a branch of mathematics called Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to discover insights without coding, scripting, or manually querying. Ayasdi’s technology also uses an ensemble of best-of-breed algorithms, automatically maps entire datasets (both structured and unstructured), and quickly provides the most relevant and statistically valid insights.
“We’re excited by Ayasdi’s unique capability to let users find insights automatically from large, complex data sets,” says Ramneek Gupta, managing director, Citi Ventures. “Their ability to abstract away complexity thereby making powerful machine learning tools accessible to ordinary business users is particularly promising. We’re looking forward to leveraging Ayasdi’s technology on several use cases within Citi’s Center of Excellence for Data Intelligence.”
“This is a critical time in the evolution of how organisations utilise data — a time when some will take a great leap forward. Ayasdi’s vision is to transform how the world uses data to solve problems and to enable every organization to become a brilliant enterprise,” says Gurjeet Singh, co-founder and chief executive at Ayasdi. “Brilliant enterprises will effectively find insights and operationalize them to create billions of dollars in growth, bring down costs, and solve many of our world’s most complex and expensive problems.”
