Ayasdi, a US-based data analysis company which combines machine learning techniques with a branch of mathematics called topographical data analysis (TDA), has raised $30.6m is series B funding led by later-stage venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation from Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of financial services company Citi, and GE Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of industrial conglomerate General Electric. Existing investors, venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Floodgate, also participated.
Ayasdi has raised a total of $44.6 million, including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grants. Previously, Ayasdi closed a series A funding round of $10.3m in January 2013.
Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP, who has joined Ayasdi’s board of directors, said: “The Big Data market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years, and the new frontier will be pioneered by the technologies that leverage the strengths of both humans and machines. In a remarkably short time, Ayasdi has not only developed a breakthrough technology, but also gained an impressive foothold in the market.”
Ramneek Gupta, managing director, Citi Ventures, said: “We’re excited by Ayasdi’s unique capability to let users find insights automatically from large, complex data sets. Their ability to abstract away complexity, thereby making powerful machine learning tools accessible to ordinary business users, is particularly promising. We’re looking forward to leveraging Ayasdi’s technology on several use cases within Citi’s Center of Excellence for Data Intelligence.”
Jonathan Ballon, chief strategy officer, GE, a customer of Ayasdi, testifies that “through powerful analytic models developed over a decade at Stanford, Ayasdi lets you find the needle in a haystack you didn’t know was there, quickly.”
Ayasdi was founded in 2008, after a decade of research at Stanford, DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF).