It’s all in the numbers for Ayasdi Inc. — lowering its customers’ costs while expanding its portfolio of clients.
The Palo Alto big data startup’s pairing of hundreds of mathematical algorithms with artificial intelligence is helping it corral a growing list of top-tier customers, including government agencies, oil companies, health care organizations and drug makers.
“We are going after an expensive problem,” Ayasdi CEO Gurjeet Singh said.
Started by Singh, Gunnar Carlsson and Harlan Sexton as a Stanford University project a decade ago and formally launched with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant in 2008, Ayasdi automatically uncovers hidden insights in data, Singh said. Along with DARPA, its $12 million in overall funding includes a $10 million Series A round from Khosla Ventures.
The company’s name in the Cherokee language means “to seek,” fitting for a company that couples machine intelligence with algorithms to comb through massive datasets in seconds.
Ayasdi’s customers include Merck & Co., the University of California, San Francisco — including UCSF’s research around post-traumatic stress disorder — and Fortune 500 oil and gas
companies.
For drug makers, Ayasdi’s cloud-based technology can sift through loads of data to shorten the drug-discovery process, save millions of dollars and ultimately bring a drug to market more quickly than the industry’s standard 10-year, $1 billion process, Singh said.
One drug developer Ayasdi wouldn’t name, is running data from its mid-stage clinical trials through Ayasdi’s system.
“Data is cost. It takes money to create data, store it, clean it and throw resources at it to learn anything from it,” Singh said. “We actually find humans able to ask the best questions and marry them with software that will fundamentally answer your questions.”
Oil and gas companies are using Ayasdi’s system to find the best places to drill. That ultimately will lead to a topological map.
“It’s not a geology problem anymore,” Singh said. “It’s a data problem.”
Ayasdi’s hide-and-seek approach is winning over customers and leading to hiring. It has 40 employees, but expects to double its workforce by the end of the year.
“We have more demand in the market,” Singh said. “I don’t have enough sales people to pick up the phone. That’s a good spot to be in.”