Ayasdi (www) Ayasdi’s Com) announced today that it has received $10 Series 25 million Funding led by Khosla Ventures and FLOODGATE Ayasdi has created the world’s first Insight Discovery platform, a technology that combines advanced mathematics, computer science, and visualization to help organizations find breakthrough insights into large and complex datasets that lead to impactful outcomes.
Ayasdi is the culmination of a decade-long research effort at Stanford, led by renowned mathematics professor and co-founder of Ayasdi, Gunnar Carlsson, and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation. Ayasdi enables organizations of any size to automatically find answers to questions that they did not know how to ask. Ayasdi overcomes the limitations of bias and query-driven “Big Data” approaches to reveal never-before-seen insights in a matter of minutes.
“At Khosla Ventures, we love companies that take a disruptive approach to transforming the industry, as Ayasdi’s Big Data team does,” said Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures. “Ayasdi’s Insight Discovery platform uses machine-powered intelligence to unravel important—and previously unattainable—answers that will help resolve some of the most pressing global, social, and economic issues. “That’s right.
Today, “Big Data” fails to solve big problems because query-based approaches are weak.
Governments, businesses, and scientists have spent the last 30 years and billions of dollars trying to solve many of the world’s biggest problems by analyzing data. Although Big Data tools have improved over the last 10 years, they have not been able to provide breakthrough insights because data analysis methods have not evolved.
Since the creation of SQL in the 1980s, data analysts have sought insight by asking questions and writing queries. There are two fundamental flaws in this approach First of all, all queries are based on human assumptions and bias Second, the query results only reveal data sections and do not show the relationship between similar data groups. While this method can uncover clues as to how to solve problems, it’s a game of chance that usually results in weeks, months, and years of iterative guesswork.
Ayasdi Breakthrough: Discover Answers to Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask
Ayasdi’s Insight Discovery platform provides insights, derived from massive and complex datasets, quickly and without queries. It is the first machine learning platform that combines computer science with a branch of mathematics known as Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that visualizes the entire dataset. Ayasdi’s platform explores datasets with hundreds of machine learning algorithms in minutes to automatically discover insights that could not be identified through query-based or ad hoc approaches.
Ayasdi is designed for any type of user—from domain experts to data scientists and researchers—and does not require coding or model building. Cloud-based platform scales to meet the most demanding processing requirements and are secured using industry standard encryption Ayasdi is designed to complement other Big Data solutions and can work with datasets of any size or type, including structured and unstructured datasets.
Ayasdi is now actively working with Global 1000 customers to address critical issues:
Discover New Drugs: first insight into 8 hours after 100+ hours leading to expedited clinical trials
Improve Cancer Therapy: Ayasdi recently discovered new insights from an 11-year dataset on breast cancer that included new sub-populations of survivors of breast cancer.
Explore New Energy Sources: identified data patterns that lead to more predictive drilling.
Predict Fraud: Unknown fraud relationships have been identified leading to new preventive measures
Prevent Terrorist Attacks: Analyzed large body of text data revealing hidden patterns
“The answers to today’s most important scientific, business and social challenges lie in data,” said Gurjeet Singh, CEO of Ayasdi. “The biggest challenge in Big Data today is to ask the right questions about the data. The power of Ayasdi is its unique ability to automatically discover insights—irrespective of complexity—without asking questions. At last, Ayasdi’s customers can learn the answers to questions they did not know how to ask in the first place. Simply stated, Ayasdi is ‘digital serendipity’ ”
Industry leaders Attestation to the Power of Ayasdi
“Technology at Ayasdi, based on Topological Data Analysis, is one of the top 10 innovations developed at DARPA over the last decade and is the key to unlocking some of the biggest national security challenges we face today,” said Tony Tether, former Director of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
“As one of the largest medical genetic centers in the United States, we conduct groundbreaking research to identify the genetic susceptibility—or predisposition—of many diseases, including cancer. Ayasdi has already helped us gather new insights that will lead to breakthrough drug discoveries,” said Eric Schadt, Director of the Icahn Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai, Sinai
“UCSF and Ayasdi are working together to develop new diagnostics and to evaluate traumatic brain and spinal injuries therapies. By using Ayasdi’s technology and Topological Data Analysis, we have been able to find insightful patterns in complex data that we hope will lead to new ways to treat, prevent and manage such traumatic injuries,” said Adam R. Ferguson, Ph.D. D. D. , Principal Investigator, UCSF Brain and Spinal Injury Centre
Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures offers business assistance, strategic advice and capital to entrepreneurs. The firm helps entrepreneurs expand the potential of their ideas for innovative technologies in clean energy, mobile, IT, cloud, big data, storage, health, food, agriculture and semiconductors. Vinod Khosla founded the company in 2004 and was formerly General Partner of Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park, California. More information can be found at Shoslaventures Com
