Latest Big Data Funding Rounds (June 17, 2014): Oration, SiSense, Scaling Data, Vizury, Health Integrated, Exabeam

Oration, the Health-Cost Transparency Company Receives Funds from TIE

Oration, the big-data startup, focused on building a completely transparent healthcare financing system, promises a value-added service to all those large organizations that are agreeable to self-insuring their employees. Oration just raised over $1 million to expand its customerbase, according to Dow Jones reports.

The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a Silicon Valley-based groupwas created in 1992 to provide financial support to emerging technology companies. This organization managed to reserve a seed fund worth about $5 million, collected from its membership network of 11,000 members, to support promising technology startups.

SiSense Raises $30 Million Funding from DFJ Growth

According to Tech Crunch, BI vendor SiSense announced $30 million in new funding, to face competition from many BI startups who are backed by VC funds and tools from legacy vendors. DFJ Growth led the funding round, backed by Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners, and Opus Capital. With the $10 million funding round of April 2013, this startups total funding capital to date stands at $50 million.

Among all its competitors, Tableau and Qlik stand out as the most formidable rivals for SiSense. Then there are the likes of IBM, SAP, or Microsoft, who have all carved out a niche for themselves in the BI software market.

SiSense’s software strength lies in data cleansing and data preparation for analysis in conjunction with other data. SiSense software offers visualization features, web-based dashboards, and further support for those dashboards on the desktops and mobile platforms. Gartner reports that the SiSense customers they surveyed selected this BI vendor because of the softwares ability to handle lots of data, its performance, and its ease of use for developers.

SiSense, based out of New York, was initiated in 2004. Currently, the company enjoys a man-power strength of 88 and plans to extend its human capital by year end. Among SiSenses notable customers are Samsung, Caterpillar, ESPN, eBay, and others.

ScalingData Wins $4.4 Million to Build Apps for Hadoop

According to WSJ Venture Capital Dispatch, ScalingData has managed to rope in capital funding of $4.4 Million from General Catalyst Partners, Google Ventures, and Red Hat Inc. Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens.

This startup has its eyes set on the still untapped market for applications that can run on Hadoop. With the ever-growing Hadoop adoption, good Hadoop-based apps can certainly storm the market. This is great news for all those companies who have to settle for home-grown Hadoop applications right now. ScalingData plans to invest its newly acquired capital in developing applications that can run as easily on Hadoop as PeopleSoft runs on Oracle, or Microsoft Office on Windows.

ScalingData strongly promotes the cost advantage of the Hadoops big-data storage platform, and plans to develop apps that could predict imminent, IT failures by collating data feeds from different parts of the infrastructure. SiSense will aggressively compete against similar vendors including Arcsight, Tibco, and Splunk Inc.

Founded recently by veteran Hadoop vendor Cloudera Inc. and other big data companies, this startup is presently working with two of the Fortune 500 companies to develop a Hadoop application.

ScalingData Chief Executive Omer Trajman, a former vice president of customer operations at Cloudera, says:

At Cloudera, we built cool apps for companies that were transformative, but we saw repeatedly in large enterprises that they didnt have the operational tooling to run it, Companies are struggling, and the IT guys are struggling.

According to General Catalyst Venture Partner Donald Fischeran application developed specifically for running Hadoop-based data centers has the potential for becoming the killer app for Hadoop market.

Vizury Receives $16 Million in Capital Funding from Intel and Ascent

The Bangalore-based big-data analytics start-up Vizury just raised a $16 million funding from Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of worlds largest chip maker. Other investors who participated in the round were equity firm Ascent Capital, and existing investors Nokia Growth Partners and Inventus Capital Partners. This six-year-old firm has raised a total funding of $27 million. Vizury plans to invest the new funds in R & D efforts and in scaling up operations in emerging markets in China, Japan, Latin America, and others. We are also evaluating our options for entering the US market, said Chetan Kulkarni, co founder and chief executive of Vizury. Vizury helps airlines or online retailers like Flipkart or Jabong analyse big datasets on the web and mobile platforms to target potential customers. This vendors big data platform, which runs across mobile and desktops, processes over 30 terabytes of data daily, which includes valuable insights such as purchase intent of nearly 500 million users. Comments from industry stalwarts about Vizury’s future: Sudheer Kuppam, managing director, Intel Capital Asia Pacific region says Vizury understands how data and technology are shaping the consumer marketing and advertising industries and is emerging a leading player in this sector. The investment will help Vizury take advantage of this big data opportunity. Raja Kumar, managing director of Ascent Capital commented that Vizury is one of the most promising high-technology product companies to emerge out of India, said. It has all ingredients to be a global leader in digital customer relationship management space.

Health Integrated Rakes in Another Million in Venture Debt Finances

The health-oriented big data company, Health Integrated managed to acquire one million in debt funds from its backer, Western Technology Investment (WTI). Health Integrated has now acquired a total of $4 million in venture debt financing from WTI. The startup plans to invest the new funds in R & D for its data analytics platform. In debt funds, the lender may not get equity in the company, but often takes up to 5 percent interest over the prime rate on the loan.

Healthcare insurance companies and other healthcare providers use the product from Health Integrated to assess and manage demand for health services among different patient populations segments. The company collects critical information about at-risk patients, and shares this information with healthcare insurers or providers. The company also provides expert advice on connecting with the at-risk patient population. The ultimate goal of this company is to protect patients from habitual, callous behavior and getting re-admitted to the hospital! Preventing re-admissions can potentially save thousands of dollars borne by health insurance companies.

Shan Padda, CEO of Health Integrated says:

The health plans and other stakeholders we serve are rapidly adopting our targeted population and relationship-driven model of holistic care management that is enabled by our sophisticated data strategies. The results on our clients medical benefit ratios and operating income have been compelling.

Exabeam Secures $10 Million in Series A Funding Round

Exabeam, a big-data security analytics company that specializes in analyzing existing logs to detect cyber attacks, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round. This funding round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, and supported by Aspect Ventures, and Angel Investor Shlomo Kramer. Exabeam plans to invest the newly acquired funds to upgrade its go-to-market strategy and associated solutions. The companys mission is to arm IT security teams with the right information to tackle todays sophisticated hackers. The revolutionary, machine-learning technology from this company targets attacker behavior rather than malware. The final objective is to track cyber attacks without deploying an army of security-savvy data scientists. Exabeams founding team consists of seasoned security and enterprise IT veterans from leading companies. The biggest advantage of Exabeam is that it leverages existing security information and event management (SIEM), and log management systems; thus there is no need for a freshly designed monitoring infrastructure. Managing Partner of Norwest Venture Partners, Matthew Howard says Exabeam is addressing a long-awaited market need by harnessing big data to address security threats beyond initial intrusion. With modern technology at its core and a team built of security powerhouses, Exabeam is poised to disrupt the security analytics scene. Theresia Gouw, co-founder of Aspect Ventures, said, This founding team has the experience, expertise and drive to make Exabeam a success by simplifying security solutions for IT teams fighting cyberattacks. Howard and Gouw are preparing to join Exabeams board of directors, which includes founders Polak and Gil, and Angel Investor and CEO of Imperva Shlomo Kramer, who has a proven track record of founding, funding and growing many successful security companies such as Check Point, or Imperva.