Startup DataSift Building “Human Data Platform”

Startup DataSift Unlocks Human Data

Backed by $77M of VC funding, startup DataSift seeks to unlock data trapped Facebook and other social networks

By Brady Miller-Wakeham

Startup: DataSift

What they do: DataSift unifies all human data (including social media, news, blogs, videos and more) – real-time and historical – in one place, processing the information, unlocking its meaning, and delivering it for use anywhere in the business.

Headquarters: San Francisco, CAStartup DataSift-logo

CEO: Nick Halstead. Prior to DataSift, he founded TweetMeme, a platform delivering social news, which quickly built an audience of millions in 30 countries and invented the Retweet button. Nick has been in the technology industry for more than two decades, joining Argonaut Software when he was only 18 years old and working for a number of other game studios and publishers before developing DataSift.

Founded: 2010

Funding: To date, DataSift has raised more than $77 million in venture capital from investors such as Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Acacia Capital Partners.

Backed by $77M, Big Data Startup DataSift Building Human Data Platform via Startup50, http://wp.me/p330ZZ-46 Click To Tweet

Problem they tackle: Although there are a number of services and tools available to provide Big Data analytics, the challenge is understanding which ones are going to make a real impact on a business. A huge difficulty companies face is structuring the vast pool of human data and finding the hidden gems that can be translated into actionable insight and innovation to drive decision-making within their businesses. DataSift’s goal is to allow people to be able to innovate socially by providing a single, unified view of data. DataSift’s human data platform unlocks the meaning of data and delivers it for use anywhere in the business.

What I like about them: DataSift is attempting to abstract away many of the complexities that prevent non-data scientists from harnessing the power of Big Data, especially with regards to data generated through social networks. DataSift acts as the layer between the unstructured, human-generated data and the products its customers can build after it has been processed. DataSift does the heavy lifting to make the data easily consumable and has built technology that is capable of processing billions of interactions a day reliably. Because DataSift anonymizes user data, companies can analyze and act on all types of unstructured data without compromising consumer trust.

Customers: DataSift has more than 1,000 customers globally, including NUVI, WPP, Oracle, and Sysomos.

Key Differentiator: DataSift is currently the only company to offer Facebook topic data to brands and marketers. Anonymized and aggregated Facebook topic data includes content on specific activities, events, brand names, and other subjects that people are sharing and engaging with.

Competitive Landscape: In the past DataSift has been mentioned alongside Gnip, Topsy, and NTT Data. However, Topsy was acquired by Apple and Gnip by Twitter, meaning both tools could turn into ones for internal use only. NTT Data is an IT services company, so any competition there is tangential, which leaves DataSift uniquely positioned – for now. According to a company representative, the confusion DataSift usually faces is that the market sees the company as a social analytics vendor, when, in fact, social analytics companies are DataSift’s customers.

 

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