13 big data and analytics companies to watch

Piling on

Investors are piling oodles of funds into startups focused on helping businesses quickly and cheaply sort through enormous data collections of both the structured and unstructured variety. Most of the newcomers not surprisingly have a cloud element to their offerings, leading to every sort of X-as-a-service pitch you can imagine. Here’s a look at some of the hottest big data and analytics companies (Note: I am only including those that have announced funding rounds this year).

Arcadia Data

Founded: 2012
Headquarters: San Mateo
Funding/investors: $11.5M in Series A funding in June, led by Mayfield.

Focus: Visual analytics and business intelligence for business users who need access to big data in enterprise Hadoop clusters without involving data scientists and other such experts. While optimized for Hadoop, customers can also use Arcadia’s technology for building browser-based apps across other data sources, including MySQL. A free download of the front-end visualization tool, Arcadia Instant, is available for Macs and Windows. Three of the co-founders come from Aster Data.

Cazena

Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.
Funding/investors: $28M, with a Series B round of $20M recently led by Formation 8.

Focus: Fast and inexpensive processing of big data in an encrypted cloud via what it calls enterprise Big Data-as-a-Service offerings broken down into Data Lake, Data Mart and Sandbox editions. The company, which emerged from stealth mode in July of 2015 and gets its name from the Hindi word for Treasure, is led mainly by former movers and shakers at Netezza, a data warehouse company acquired by IBM in 2010 for $1.7 billion.

DataHero

Founded: 2011
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding/investors: $6.1M in Series A funding in May, led by Foundry Group.

Focus: Encrypted cloud-based business intelligence and analytics for end users, regardless of technical expertise. Self-service offering works with many popular services, including Salesforce.com, Dropbox, HubSpot and Google Analytics. Now led by CEO Ed Miller, a 25-year software industry veteran and entrepreneur.

DataTorrent

Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Santa Clara
Funding/investors: $23.8M, including a $15M Series B round in April led by Singtel Innov8.

Focus: Real-time big data analytics supported by an open source-based stream and batch processing engine that the company says can deal with billions of events per second in Hadoop clusters. Its co-founders both previously led engineering efforts at Yahoo (one at Yahoo Finance).

Enigma

Founded: 2011
Headquarters: New York City
Funding/investors: $32.7M, including a $28.2M Series B round announced in June and led by New Enterprise Associates.

Focus: Data discovery and analytics, both for enterprises that want better insight into their information and for the public, which can tap into a huge collection of public records.Enigma offers enterprises the Abstract data discovery platform and Signals analytics engine, which can be used to craft customized applications. Oh, and it uses one of those cool dot.io top-level domains for its URL.

Experfy

Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Harvard Innovation Lab in Boston
Funding/investors: $1.5M in seed funding, led by XPRIZE Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis.

Focus: Cloud-based consulting marketplace designed to match up big data and analytics experts with clients who need their services. Experfy provides advisory services, big data readiness assessments, road maps, predictive dashboards, algorithms, and a number of custom analytics solutions for mid-market and Fortune 500s, according to co-CEO and Founder Harpreet Singh.

Interana

Founded: 2013
Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.
Funding/investors: $28.2M, including $20M in a Series B round in January led by Index Ventures.

Focus: Interactive analytics to answer business questions about how customers behave and products are used. A proprietary database enables its offering to deal with billions of events.Company was formed by a couple of former Facebook engineers and one of their wives, who serves as CEO.

JethroData

Founded: 2012
Headquarters: New York City
Funding/investors: $12.6M, including an $8.1M Series B round led by Square Peg Capital in June.

Focus: Index-based SQL engine for big data on Hadoop that enables speedy transactions with business intelligence offerings such as those from Qlik, Tableau and MicroStrategy. Co-founders come from Israel and have a strong track record at companies located in the United States. Shown are JethroData cofounders Eli Singer, Boaz Raufman and Ronen Ovadya

Neokami

Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Munich, Germany
Funding/investors: $1.1M in seed funding from angel investors.

Focus: “Revolutionising the Machine-Learning-as-a-Service space” that you probably didn’t even realize existed. This company exploits its expertise in artificial intelligence for CRM, security analytics and data science tools, the latter of which can be used to make sense of unstructured data via self-learning algorithms.

SlamData

Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Boulder
Funding/investors: $3.6M, led by True Ventures

Focus: Crafting the commercial version of the SlamData open-source project in an effort to help customers visualize semi-structured NoSQL data in a secure and manageable way. A key strength for SlamData is that it works natively with NoSQL databases like MongoDB. CEO Jeff Carr says SlamData is following in the footsteps of Tableau and Splunk, which have targeted structured and unstructured data, respectively.

Snowflake Computing

Founded: 2012
Headquarters: San Mateo
Funding/investors: $71M, with the most recent round of $45M led by Altimeter Capital.

Focus: This company doesn’t hide from the relatively old-fashioned term data warehouse, but puts a new twist on the technology by recreating it for the cloud and boasting of “the flexibility of big data platforms.” Led by former Microsoft and Juniper honcho Bob Muglia. Snowflake positions its offering as an elastic data warehouse.

Talena

Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Milpitas, Calif.
Funding/investors: $12M, including from Canaan Partners, announced in August.

Focus: Emerged from stealth mode in August with management software for big data environments, ensuring applications based on Hadoop, NoSQL and other platforms are available throughout their life cycle. Involves advances in data storage, recovery and compliance. CEO and Founder Nitan Donde led engineering efforts at Aster Data, EMC and other firms.

Tamr

Founded: 2013
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
Funding/investors: $42.4M, with Series B funding of $25.2M from Hewlett-Packard Ventures and others announced in June.

Focus: Co-founder and database legend Michael Stonebraker says Tamr’s ‘scalable data-unification platform will be the next big thing in data and analytics ─ similar to how column-store databases were the next big thing in 2004.” In other words, Tamr uses machine learning and human input to enable customers to make use of data currently silo-ed in disparate databases, spreadsheets, logs and partner resources. Tamr’s tech got its start at MIT’s CSAIL.