Data Sheet—Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Good morning, everyone. Printer maker Lexmark is buying into the paperless office, while Apple now owns high-performance database technology. Plus, big data company Ayasdi just scored another $55 million. The round was led by a venture firm that has seen a lot of press lately, and not in a good way. So this is a nice pick-me-up. Read on for more details and lots more news. Have a productive Wednesday!

TOP OF MIND

Silicon Valley on trial. The six-woman, six-man jury who will decide the Kleiner Perkins sexism trial is scheduled to begin deliberations today.

The closing arguments painted two starkly contrasting portraits of the storied venture capital firm behind big investment "wins" like Google and Amazon.com. One, a bastion of paternalism and misogynist behavior. The other, the victim of a bitter ex-employee unable to accept her own shortcomings.

Even if Kleiner Perkins prevails in its defense, it's difficult to describe that outcome as the win that partner John Doerr believes the firm needs to regain its reputation.

Can big data disrupt commercial real estate? Jared and Joshua Kushner, whose last name is well-known in New York property circles, are behind startup Cadre. The company is building an analytics platform to guide management and investment decisions. The company just raised $18.3 million from Thrive Capital and General Catalyst, but there’s at least another $250 million behind it.

THE DOWNLOAD

Big bucks for big data startup. What good is well-organized data if you don’t have enough people to ask the right questions?

Analytics software company Ayasdi uses mathematics theory to find potential patterns in data and visualize them as geometric shapes, basically offering hints about the best places for data analysts to start looking. Its mantra is simplicity, a message that just helped it close another $55 million in funding.

The Series C round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The capitalization also includes existing backers Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate, Citi Ventures and new investors Centerview Capital and Draper Nexus. So far, the company has raised $100 million.

The new money will go toward expanding the Ayasdi sales team and scaling its technology beyond its initial strongholds in health care and financial services into solutions for retail, manufacturing, energy and technology. “We need better algorithms to ask the right questions,” said co-founder and CEO Gurjeet Singh, an expert in mathematics and machine learning who previously worked for Google and Texas Instruments.

“Ayasdi stood out to us because it has compelling technology that can be readily deployed across Fortune 500 companies like Citi,” said Debby Hopkins, CEO of Citi Ventures and chief innovation officer of Citi. “Ayasdi ingests massive amounts of data and creates visual representations that allow companies to identify outliers that might otherwise go undetected. As institutions create bigger and bigger volumes of data, the importance of tools to help them decipher the information quickly and easily is crucial.”

Over the past 12 months (ended Jan. 30), Ayasdi (the name is Cherokee for “seek”) has managed a 400% bookings growth. Customers include Citigroup, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, and the Mercy health system.

“As you can imagine, a company like Citi—which has around 200 million customer accounts, moves an average of $3 trillion per day in business and institutional financial flows, and operates in more than 160 countries—has a lot of complex data,” Hopkins said. “We have wide variety of use cases from consumer to institutional, and in each instance, Ayasdi’s software helped to increase the number of variables we're analyzing and dramatically cut down the time to drive results, which is critical for our business.”

Ayasdi’s customers use the software for everything from fraud detection to risk management and compliance. Lockheed Martin, for example, uses Ayasadi to monitor more than 2,000 different product initiatives and programs across five divisions. The software acts as an “early warning system” that alerts executives about factors that could lead to costly delays, like one related to the F-35 fighter jet. “It helps them intervene much earlier in the process,” Singh said.

To date, Ayasdi has scored an appreciable number of accounts in financial services (three of the five biggest companies in the world) and healthcare, where it has developed a special offering called Ayasdi Care. Mercy uses the software to identify clinical best practices that improve patient outcomes and save money; it expects to reduce costs by $100 million over the next three years.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Apple buys super-fast database technology. FoundationDB’s technology speeds applications such as digital advertising. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the company previously raised $22.7 million.

Here’s why a former Amazon engineer joined Pivotal. Benjamin Black is spearheading the company’s Internet of things strategy.

First official proposal on sharing cyberthreat information. Two members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have introduced the first of at least three bills seeking to establish official procedures. The intent is to thwart data breaches more proactively.

Don’t underestimate Microsoft’s influence in mobile apps. Especially now that Samsung is bundling many of them on its Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

The world’s biggest commercial supercomputer? Cray is making a new five-petaflop system for oil-and-gas company Petroleum Geo-Services that will be used for big data analytics and seismic imaging. For perspective, similar computers being built for Total and BP have peak speeds of 2 petaflops. Trust me, the new system is better.

Brave new world for databases. Realm’s technology runs on more than 100 mobile devices and runs mobile apps from Groupon, Intuit, Rite Aid, Zynga, Expensify and Fortune 500 organizations. The four-year-old Y Combinator graduate this week disclosed a $20 million Series B funding round led by repeat investor Khosla Ventures and new backer Scale Venture Partners. The Danish co-founders were developers at Nokia.

This simulation startup is probably worth notice. London-based Improbable has landed a $20 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz. Its first focus is on creating “simulated worlds” for gaming companies, but the company also envisions potential applications in health care and defense. “You can imagine our approach as a swarm of decentralized, heterogenous workers collaborating together to form a simulation much larger than any single worker can understand,” the company writes on its introductory blog post.

$12.5 million for simpler storage management. Hedvig, founded by a former Amazon and Facebook engineer, has scored $12.5 million in seed and Series A funding from True Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and Redpoint Ventures. The company’s CEO Avinash Lakshman was involved in two well-known open source database software projects, Cassandra and Dynamo (the precursor to NoSQL). Intuit is among Hedvig’s early customers.