Ayasdi Launches With $10 Million From Khosla Ventures and FLOODGATE to Pioneer Automated Insight Discovery From 'Big Data'

Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it has received $10.25 million in a Series A 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 in large and complex datasets that lead to impactful outcomes.

Ayasdi represents the culmination of a decade long research effort at Stanford, led by renowned mathematics professor and Ayasdi Co-Founder 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 they did not know to ask. Ayasdi overcomes the limitations of biased and query-driven "Big Data" approaches to reveal never-before-seen insights within a matter of minutes.

"At Khosla Ventures, we love companies that take a disruptive approach to transform an industry, as Ayasdi's team is doing in the field of big data," said Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures. "Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform utilizes machine powered intelligence to unearth important -- and previously unattainable -- answers that will help solve some of the most pressing global, social, and economic issues."

Today, "Big Data" Fails to Solve Big Problems Because Query-Based Approaches are Flawed
Governments, businesses, and scientists have spent the last 30 years and billions of dollars attempting to address many of the world's biggest problems by analyzing data. Although Big Data tools have improved over the last 10 years, they have failed to yield breakthrough insights because data analysis methods have not evolved.

Since the creation of SQL in the 1980s, data analysts have tried to find insights by asking questions and writing queries. This approach has two fundamental flaws. First, all queries are based on human assumptions and bias. Secondly, query results only reveal slices of data and do not show relationships between similar groups of data. While this method can uncover clues about how to solve problems, it is a game of chance that usually results in weeks, months, and years of iterative guesswork.

The Ayasdi Breakthrough: Discovering Answers to Questions You Didn't Know to Ask
Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform delivers insights, derived from massive and complex datasets, quickly and without queries. It is the first machine learning platform that combines computer science and 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 determined 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. The cloud-based platform scales to meet the most demanding processing requirements and is secured using industry standard encryption. Ayasdi is engineered to complement other Big Data solutions and can work with datasets of any size or type including structured and unstructured.

Ayasdi is now actively working with Global 1000 customers to solve critical issues:

• Discover New Drugs: First insight in 8 hours from 100+ hours leading to expedited clinical trials.
• Improve Cancer Therapy: Recently, Ayasdi Discovered new insights from an 11-year breast cancer dataset that included new sub-populations of breast cancer survivors.
• Explore New Energy Sources: Identified data patterns leading to more predictive drilling.
• Predict Fraud: Found unknown fraud relationships leading to new preventive measures.
• Prevent Terrorist Attacks: Analyzed large corpus of text data revealing hidden patterns.

"The answers to today's most important scientific, business and social problems lie in data," said Gurjeet Singh, CEO of Ayasdi. "The biggest challenge in Big Data today is asking the right questions of data. The power of Ayasdi is its unique ability to automatically discover insights -- regardless of complexity -- without asking questions. Ayasdi's customers can finally learn the answers to questions that they didn't know to ask in the first place. Simply stated, Ayasdi is 'digital serendipity.'"