There’s more money from big-name investors for big data. ClearStory Data, a newly launched startup focused on bringing big data technology to the masses, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and a number of individual investors, which include 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.
ClearStory Data wants to make it easy to gather and explore diverse, dispersed sets of data from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the Web to help business users to gain insights and discover new business opportunities. ClearStory analyzes data from a number of sources, both public and private, to uncover new trends and patterns. The result of this could be the discovery of new business opportunities and deeper consumer intelligence.
The startup’s offering, which has not been released yet, will connect to data stored in databases as well as the web and other sources, and adds a visual discovery component to make it easy for users to parse through this data and make sense of the information. The beauty of ClearStory is that it allows businesses to analyze internal and publicly available data at the same time and make this data easy for the masses to understand.
The company was co-founded by Aster Data (acquired by Teradata) alums John Cieslewicz and Vaibhav Nivargi. Fellow founder and CEO Sharmila Mulligan worked previously at Netscape, Kiva Software, Opsware (acquired by HP) and Aster Data.
She explains in a release: “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.”
There’s no doubt that big data is drawing major attention from investors and the enterprise. If ClearStory can hold true on its promise to be able to parse and make big data understandable to companies, it could have a bright future. Clearly, big-name investors seem to think so.
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