Metanautix, a big data analytics company focused on simplifying the data supply chain, has announced that it has partnered with Sequoia Capital for a $7 million Series A financing round. The round also includes investments from the Stanford University endowment fund and from Shiva Shivakumar, former VP of engineering and distinguished entrepreneur at Google. Founded by big data pioneers from Google and Facebook, Metanautix is focused on solving the data challenges that hinder the modern enterprise, including slow time to insights, need for multiple, specialized resources and inability to combine data of different shape, structure, format and location.
Companies want to analyze all of their burgeoning data that is spread across multiple depots. Those same companies are plagued by slow access to data and complex pipelines that are laborious to maintain and require specialized resources. Business analysts are often comfortable with ubiquitous SQL and would rather not have to work through a software engineer, the latter reduced to being a code monkey. Metanautix simplifies and speeds up analysis with SQL-driven, massively scalable technology without requiring a business to relocate their data. I’m enjoying helping Metanautix shape their product and business strategy,” said Bill Coughran, partner at Sequoia Capital and former SVP of Engineering at Google.
Along with the funding, Metanautix is announcing an early access program. Enterprises interested in participating can sign up at – http://metanautix.com/early-access. While Metanautix has been in stealth focused on building an innovative product and a strong team, the solution is already gaining traction with half a dozen customers, including enterprises like HP.
Gartner estimates that spending for big data will surpass $40 billion by 2016. A large portion of that cost is spent navigating the complexity of a slow, cumbersome and opaque data pipeline. Narrowly focused technologies, while well suited for specific types of data, make it very difficult to access and combine data of different types, such as records, logs, documents, audio, images and video. In addition, the need for specialized resources results in analytics that are difficult for people across an organization to understand, and business processes that are hard to audit and govern.
Metanautix creates a new data paradigm for enterprises. The analyst is put in the driver’s seat and is allowed to derive insights from any data type for rapidly implementing business improvements. Metanautix treats any data as a table, letting analysts combine all data and ask questions in an intuitive way. To greatly simplify the data pipeline, Metanautix removes the need for extraneous tasks, like moving data and fitting it into a centralized system. The company marries the high-level functionality and ease of use found in standard SQL with next generation distributed computing, re-imagining SQL for the new world of big data. Using standard SQL makes understanding the analysis easier for everyone in the organization and greatly simplifies compliance and privacy.
Integrating the data supply chain has been a thorny problem troubling enterprise companies with rich and complex data ecosystems. With Metanautix, Theo and team are solving a riddle and unlocking new value from existing data. When I saw the technology behind Metanautix, I was excited to support the company and team,” said Shiva Shivakumar, CEO Urban Engines (and former VP of engineering and distinguished entrepreneur at Google).
Metanautix was founded by big data experts from Google and Facebook. At Google, CEO Theo Vassilakis led an engineering team of 75 and drove the development of Dremel, a large-scale, interactive ad hoc query engine for big data processing that powers Google’s BigQuery. Under his leadership, Theo’s teams supported a broad range of functions such as sales, finance, human resources and other parts of the business, in addition to product and engineering. CTO Apostolos Lerios worked at Facebook developing infrastructure solutions behind the world’s largest photo repository – 300 billion images and counting. Lerios also single-handedly created and implemented the dynamic image processing architecture that drives the photo layouts in Facebook’s Timeline and News Feed.
The modern enterprise operates on a plethora of data sources. There is great value in using all of these data sources and in providing superior access to ask questions of any data,” said Theo Vassilakis, CEO of Metanautix. “We’ve made it fast and simple for anyone in an organization to work with any number of data sources at any scale and at a speed that enables rapid business decisions.”
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