Big data has emerged as a big trend over the last several years, but as an area it has remained ill-defined and focused for the most part on data scientists, while ignoring business users. Adatao wants to change that by offering a solution that has something for both parties and a collaboration environment that lets them work together in one tool -and they got $13M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Light Speed Ventures and Bloomberg Beta to give it a shot. As part of the deal, Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz will sit on the Adatao board and Marc Andreessen will be a board advisor.
The technology world is seeing a huge increase in activity in the analytics space. Essentially all the startups delivering an analytics solution are betting big on the fact that organizations buy into the ability to generate real value from analyzing data from both within existing organizational systems and from the massive amounts of data rolling around social networks and connected devices. But there is something of a disconnect in many of the existing systems and that disconnect lies in the very way analytics occurs both from an organizational perspective and a technological one. On a technological level, most analytics systems are separated into two distinct parts. There are the big heavy processing engines that require data scientists to manipulate them, and there are the visualization tools that paint the “pretty pictures” that people can actually use. From an organizational perspective, often these two groups sat in different locations, tinkering on their different tools and communicated via email. The ideal is to have these two parts sit on a common platform with collaboration enabled in-between.
