Adatao Democratizes Big Data Intelligence for Biz Users

Backed by $13M in Series A funding, startup Adatao enables cross-team Big Data collaboration

Startup: Adatao

What they do: Adatao democratizes Big Data intelligence for business users by delivering usable insights in a user-friendly interface resembling Google Docs.

Headquarters: Mountain View, California

CEO: Christopher Nguyen, previously the engineering director of Google Apps.

Founded: 2012 Adatao logo

Funding: $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Lightspeed Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.

Problem they tackle: As companies continue to adapt to the organizational changes sparked by Big Data, one problem continues to block progress: cross-team collaboration. Collaboration related to data analytics is slow, and submitting a query can potentially take weeks or months, even with the help of a data scientist. Unless you have a big staff of developers who know coding or even specific programming languages like R or Python, or you have a business team that is comfortable with coding, your ability to extract insights from all of that data will be limited.

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What I like about them: There is often a disconnect between a company’s data and its decision makers. Adatao gives non-technical business users access to data by allowing them to initiate queries using natural language – without requiring IT pros or data scientists to interpret it first. The system also responds to coding languages data scientists are already comfortable using, so it can be adaptable to all users.

Key Differentiator: While many other Big Data startups focus on making data more accessible for data scientists, Adatao focuses on the business user. Building on legacy solutions such as Hadoop and Spark, Adatao aims to provide a powerful tool for accessing Big Data, while presenting the information with an easy-to-use interface.

Competitive Landscape: Adatao believes that it most directly competes with IBM Watson. However, abstracting away complexity is an industry-wide – even an economy-wide – trend. In other words, Adato isn’t nearly as uniquely positioned as it would like you to believe. Other Big Data startups that provide easy-to-use interfaces targeted at business users include Entrigna, Roambi, and BigML, to name only a few.

That said, this space is still a land grab, but Adatao will need to stake out its claim quickly. This space is already evolving at a breakneck speed.

Backed by $13M in Series A funding, startup Adatao enables cross-team Big Data collaboration Click To Tweet

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