Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and a number of individual investors have invested in ClearStory Data. Financial terms weren’t announced. Palo Alto, Calif.-based ClearStory helps business users gather and explore dispersed data.
PRESS RELEASE
ClearStory Data, a company creating an intuitive new way for users to
conduct self-driven big data exploration, today announced an investment
from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and a number
of individual investors. ClearStory Data is making it easy to gather and
explore big, diverse, dispersed data from corporate data sources, Hadoop
and the Web for business users to gain quick insights and discover new
business opportunities.
Recent IDC projections point to a $16.9 billion market opportunity for
big data by 2015 with a slice of this focused on big data platforms
including Hadoop. However, a large part of this will also come from new
innovations that make it easier for users to leverage publicly available
data on the Web and bring it together with a company’s own internal data.
As the volume of data across the Web and in businesses’ internal
repositories continues to explode, the demand for practical data analysis
solutions that blend data from different sources is rising. With data
specialists in short supply, companies are in dire need of solutions that
make diverse data exploration easy to achieve. ClearStory Data is
tackling this last mile problem of allowing business users to combine the
hoards of publicly available data on the Web with corporate data for
users to drive an exploration that uncovers new trends and patterns. The
discovery of trends and patterns presents companies with new business
opportunities and deeper consumer intelligence.
“In 2011, the global output of data increased 62 percent, yet there’s a
massive shortage in the number of qualified data professionals to process
this data,” said Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, CEO and Founder of ClearStory
Data. “ClearStory Data is ushering in the era of ‘self-driven big data
exploration’ by making it easier for the masses and not just data
scientists and quants to connect, explore and glean intuitive insights
from data derived from multiple sources.”
ClearStory Data connects to data stored in relational databases, Hadoop,
the Web, and third-party sources to unlock and share the combined value
of this data. The service combines heterogeneous data access with new
visual exploration capabilities on a massive scale, so business users can
quickly and easily obtain and disseminate actionable insight.
“Everybody knows you need data from many third-party sources as well as
new platforms but nobody offers a great way to bring it together,” said
Curt Monash, Monash Research. “ClearStory is pursuing a large
opportunity.”
In addition to seed funding from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz,
and Khosla Ventures, ClearStory Data has secured investment from notable
Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders including
Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at Wealthfront; Anand
Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, Senior Vice Presidents at Walmart Global
e-Commerce and co-founders of Junglee and Kosmix; Tim Howes, co-founder
of Rockmelt and ex-CTO Netscape, and Nitin Donde, former executive at
EMC, 3Par and Aster Data.
“The big data market is a large and a fast growing opportunity where the
key challenge will be the ability for businesses to leverage publicly
available data on the Web and bring it together with a company’s own
internal data seamlessly,” said Karim Faris, Partner at Google Ventures.
“ClearStory has the team, expertise and experience in data to create a
solution that can combine public with private data to extract new and
interesting insights for businesses.”
ClearStory Data CEO Sharmila Mulligan is a serial entrepreneur with more
than 15 years experience developing major technology companies. Her
leadership at Netscape and Kiva Software enabled users to navigate and
conduct transactions on the Internet. Her work continued with Opsware
(acquired by HP), which resulted in the creation of the Data Center
Automation market. Most recently, Mulligan led Aster Data into the big
data analytics market opportunity through its acquisition by Teradata.
ClearStory Data’s co-founders include John Cieslewicz and Vaibhav
Nivargi, both experts in big data processing and data-at-scale.
Cieslewicz brings real world experience from Aster Data and his doctorate
in high-performance data processing. Nivargi adds his expertise in
distributed systems and storage systems from Stanford and previous
companies in the data market including Aster Data.
“The $17 billion big data opportunity where bringing together internal
and external data and easing data exploration will lead to one of the
most interesting and valuable aspects of the big data market
opportunity,” said Anand Rajarman, Senior Vice President at Walmart
Global e-Commerce and co-founder of Kosmix and Junglee. “The ClearStory
team has a proven track record in big data and is poised to play
significant roles in this new market.”
ClearStory Data is hiring engineers passionate about improving every
user’s data experience with expertise in distributed systems, high
performance data processing, analytics, visualization, unstructured data
and Hadoop. If interested, please email working@clearstorydata.com. To
learn more and register as an early user visit www.clearstorydata.com.
About ClearStory Data
ClearStory Data is focused on enabling self-driven
big data exploration. ClearStory Data is making it easy for business
users to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data for more
intuitive insights. The ClearStory Data team — leaders in data
processing, analytics, data at scale and visualization — has decades of
experience at Netscape, Opsware, IBM, Aster Data, HP and Teradata. Based
in Palo Alto, ClearStory Data is backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen
Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures and notable Silicon Valley industry
leaders. For more information, visit www.clearstorydata.com.
