ClearStory Data has announced an investment from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures as well as individual investors. The company aims to help business users conduct self-driven big data exploration - making it easier to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the web so that they can gain quick insights and discover new business opportunities.
"In 2011, the global output of data increased 62%, 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, she added, intends to help advance self-driven big data exploration by making it easier for the masses and not just data scientists and quantitative analysts to explore and gain insights from data derived from multiple sources.
According to the vendor, it is tackling the ‘last mile problem' of allowing business users to combine large amounts of publicly available data on the web with corporate data, in order to uncover new trends and patterns, thus enabling new business opportunities and deeper consumer intelligence.
ClearStory Data connects to data stored in relational databases, Hadoop, the web, and third-party sources to take advantage of the combined value of this data. The service combines heterogeneous data access with visual exploration capabilities on a massive scale, so business users can quickly and easily obtain and disseminate actionable insight.
"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."
Shahani-Mulligan has more than 15 years of experience developing major technology companies. She has worked at Netscape, Kiva Software, and Opsware, and most recently at Aster Data, which was acquired by Teradata. ClearStory Data's co-founders include John Cieslewicz, who holds a doctorate in high-performance data processing and also worked at Aster Data; and Vaibhav Nivargi, who has expertise in distributed systems and storage systems from Stanford and previous companies in the data market including Aster Data.
For more information, visit www.clearstorydata.com.