| Company | MetaLayer |
| Address | 705 S. 3rd St. #3 Philadelphia, PA, 19147 USA |
| Founders | Jonathan Gosier & Matthew Griffiths |
| Founded | April 2011 |
| Funding | $ 30.000 |
| Employees | 3 |
| Website | www.MetaLayer.com |
| Rating | 7 bits |
MetaLayer is a big data startup that helps organisations make visualizations from large and complex datasets. Its objective is to make the worlds information easier to understand, visualize and share without the need for a big data scientist. McKinsey expects a shortage of 140.00 190.000 data scientists in 2018 in the United States alone. MetaLayer tries to solve this problem not by delivering more data scientists, but by making data understandable for non IT people.
The applications that they have developed allow non-technical staff within organisations to perform high-level and technical research like predictive analytics, real-time data processing and data visualization. According to Jonathan Grosier, everyone can be turned into a data scientist and the products that they offer are simple, inexpensive and cater to non-expert, exactly what is necessary to achieve just that.
They claim to turn sophisticated data-mining technologies into a drag-and-drop process that can be understood by everyone. They have developed a SaaS version, which is already in use by some important institutions in the areas of Public Safety, Intelligence, Law Enforcement and Disaster Response as well as advertising agencies. These organisations use the two products developed: DELV, which allows non-technical users to easily create visualizations from complex datasets, and SURV, which takes survey data and automatically detects interesting trends in the answers and produces visual reports of the findings.
However, there are more companies who claim to make big data understandable for non-IT managers and personnel. What is the differentiating factor of Metalayer?
Well first of all, the drag-and-drop is very easy to use and the dynamic filtering gives a user a lot of extra option to easily navigate through the data. Files such as excel extracts are available instantly as well as combining different data sets and visualizing it is done with a few clicks.
Secondly, they plan to launch MetaLayer.org, a scaled down product that service public interests through free and open source software in order to help for example non-profit organisations, students or journalists. If that can be achieved, it could a game changer that brings the opportunities of big data to a new group of people who currently do not have access to it due to the high costs or IT expertise required.
The company graduated in December 2011 from DreamVentures incubator and launched its dashboard, which is still in beta, in November 2011. MetaLayer also offers two APIs, imgLayer, taking words and objects from images and makes tags out of them, and dataLayer, which adds context to social data.
MetaLayer is seeking additional funding as at the moment they have received a mere $ 30.000,- from Acceleprise and that should not be a problem with the product they offer. In 2012 they won the Startup Showcase Audience Choice Award and at BigData-Startups we believe there is a bright future ahead for Metalayer. Although they are still a young and small startup, we give them therefore a 7 bits rating.
