Ayasdi is a data analysis start-up built on the career of one man: Gunnar Carlsson, a professor of mathematics at Stanford.
Government spending for science has helped a lot too. Dr. Carlsson was the principal investigator on research projects that were financed, from 2000 to 2008, with $10 million from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.
In 2008, when Dr. Carlsson and his co-founders wanted to try to commercialize the research, it was Darpa and another government organization, IARPA, or Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, that put up $1.25 million in the form of a Small Business Innovation Research grant, for “high-risk, high-payoff research.”
Two years later, seed funding allowed Ayasdi, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., to build prototype technology. On Wednesday it is celebrating its commercial coming-out party, announcing that it received more than $10 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
But Silicon Valley is full of Big Data start-ups that promise to translate the ever-growing flood of digital data into practical insights in business and science. So what is different about Ayasdi, except its quirky name (“to seek,” in Cherokee)?
When asked, Vinod Khosla, an enthusiastic investor, said that most of the Big Data start-ups are focused on producing software to more efficiently manage data and handle queries. “But this is a new fundamental technique of mathematical analysis,” Mr. Khosla said.
That technique is called topological data analysis. Simply put, the technique analyzes the shape of complex data, identifying clusters and their statistical significance. That, in turn, delivers a more accurate “big picture” of the data, according to Robert Ghrist, a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, who is familiar with Dr. Carlsson’s work but has no ties to Ayasdi. Such data could represent clusters of patients or customers, for example.
Ayasdi’s tools allow for automated discovery instead of the previous model of having people type in search-style queries, which works only if a person knows the right question to ask, said Gurjeet Singh, co-founder and chief executive of Ayasdi. As Dr. Carlsson explained it, “The idea is to get the data to speak to you in a more unfiltered way.”
People familiar with the technology and Dr. Carlsson’s work are impressed. “The discovery techniques of topological data analysis are going to have a huge impact, and Gunnar Carlsson is at the forefront of this research,” said Anthony J. Tether, former director of Darpa.
Potential is one thing, but real utility in science and business is another. Early reports from those who have tried out the technology sound encouraging.
Adam R. Ferguson, an assistant professor at the Brain and Spinal Injury Center of the University of California, San Francisco, has used Ayasdi’s technology to investigate vast cross-species databases to expedite biomedical discovery and treatment.
“It’s remarkably good at detecting patterns and presenting them,” said Dr. Ferguson, who also works with other data-analysis software from SAS Institute and I.B.M., and R, an open-source statistical programming language. “Yes, I think it is qualitatively different.”
Ayasdi has about 20 other customers including Merck, the Food and Drug Administration, the United States Department of Agriculture, and several unnamed large corporations. They are using the company’s technology for drug discovery, oil and gas exploration, and financial-market research.
Today, Ayasdi’s 30 employees are nearly all scientists and engineers. The new financing, Dr. Singh said, will be spent to build out the company’s business, adding marketing, sales and administrative staff members, as well as more engineers for project development of its cloud-based software service.