| Company | Ayasdi |
| Address | 636 Ramona Palo Alto, CA, 94301 USA |
| Founders | Gunnar Carlsson, Gurjeet Singh & Harlan Sexton |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Funding | $ 41.25 million |
| Employees | 30 |
| Website | www.Ayasdi.com |
| Rating | 7 bits |
Ayasdi was launched in 2008 but is based on 10 years of research at DARPA, Stanford and NSF. From 2000 to 2008 one of the founders, dr. Gunnar Carlsson worked on research projects that were funded by DARPA and the National Science Foundation with $ 10 million. In 2008, dr. Carlsson and the two other co-founders, Gurjeet Singh and Harlan Sexton, decided to commercialize the research and they founded Ayasdi.
Eventually, it took them two years to build a prototype of the product. Ayasdi uses a new technique, previously not yet seen at other big data startups. This technique is called topological data analysis. In short, this type of analysis focuses on the shape of complex data and is able to identify clusters and any statistical significance that is present. Data scientist can use this to reveal inherent patterns in those clusters. The dozens of algorithms use algebraic topology to analyse the topological spaces and allow for automated discovery of insights instead of having to enter a search query. Ayasdi claims to answer the questions you never even thought to ask by visualizing the correlations in all data.
Anthony J. Tether, former director of DARPA, expects that topological data analysis is going to have a huge impact. The software has the potential to deliver completely new and fresh insights on existing databases such as huge social networking datasets or genetics and healthcare data sets. The software is cloud-based and Ayasdi and the visualizations show colourful, 3D pictures on the screen that give a great insight.
These insights look like the social graph we can create from our Linkedin account, but now applied to almost any industry, any type of data and much more complicated and huge data sets. Analysing for example public (health) databases could give valuable insights into the correlation between genes, environment and lifestyles; complex data sets and behaviours that used to be almost impossible to analyse quickly.
At the moment, Ayasdi has about 20 customers including the Food and Drug administration as well as the United Stated department of Agriculture. The 30 employees currently working at Ayasdi are predominantly big data engineers. With the recent Series A funding of $ 10 million by Khosla Ventures and Floodgate they now want to grow their business and also take on board marketing and finance staff. Ayasdi could deliver a revolution in analysing complex data, but the technology will have to prove itself in the coming years. We therefore give them a 7 bits rating.
Update: Ayasdi scores $ 30 million in Series B funding – July 17, 2013.
