The 10 Hottest Data Analytics Startups Of 2019

With the volume of digital data growing exponentially, businesses and organizations are struggling to make sense of – and derive value from – all that data. Here are 10 startups with leading-edge data analysis technology to help tackle the problem.

Avoiding Analysis Paralysis

Business analysis software, from simple reporting tools to complex, AI-based predictive and prescriptive analytical systems, are the means for making sense of the ever-growing volumes of data generated by today’s IT systems – from 40 zettabytes this year to 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to market researcher IDC.

It’s no wonder businesses and organizations are forecast to globally spend $189.1 billion this year for big data and business analytics solutions, a number that’s expected to reach $274.3 billion by 2022. While much of that spending will flow to big, established vendors, a lot of the innovation in big data technology is coming from startups developing ground-breaking software in data management and business analytics.

Solution providers who want to offer their customers the latest software and services in business analytics to tackle their big data challenges should take notice. Here are CRN's picks for the top data analytics startups in 2019.

Aible

CEO: Arijit Sengupta

Aible develops what it calls "real world" artificial intelligence technology that analyzes data for business impact and business outcomes based on cost-benefit tradeoffs and operational constraints. While most AI systems emphasize model accuracy, Aible's founders argue that approach doesn't take into account that the costs of different types of errors are not equal, possibly overlooking that one-in-100 deal that would be a huge win for a business.

San Francisco-based Aible was founded in October 2018 and officially launched in March. The startup has established a partnership with business analytics vendor Tableau Software to link the two companies' products and provide business users with an easy way to leverage Aible’s AI capabilities from within the Tableau environment.

Alluxio

CEO: Steven Mih

Alluxio has developed a data orchestration platform for analytics and machine learning in the cloud. The Alluxio system, based on a memory-centric architecture, fundamentally enables the separation of storage and compute functions, bringing data closer to distributed compute operations and simplifying data access for cloud workloads.

Alluxio was founded in 2015 at U.C. Berkeley's AMPLab by the creators of the Tachyon open source project. Based in San Mateo, Calif., Alluxio raised $8.5 million in Series B financing in January, bringing its total funding to $16 million. Mih was named CEO in March with founding CEO Haoyuan Li, who developed the Alluxio technology, becoming chief technology officer.

Noodle Analytics

CEO: Stephen Pratt

Noodle Analytics is developing AI-based data analysis technology targeting what the company calls “Industry 4.0” or smart factory applications to manage product quality, asset health and production flow – all with an eye toward improving efficiency and reducing waste in manufacturing, consumer products, transportation and distribution.

The company’s Noodle.ai Enterprise AI Platform includes the Edge Gateway and Edge Server appliances.

Founded in 2016, Noodle Analytics is based in San Francisco.

Panoply

CEO: Yaniv Leven

Panoply bills itself as offering simple data management for analytics. The Panoply cloud platform is a “smart” data warehouse that automates the three major steps to successful business analytics: Data collection and transformation (ETL), database storage management and query performance management.

The Panoply system supports a wide range of data sources including databases such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB and PostgreSQL; storage systems including Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage; advertising systems such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and DoubleClick; and CRM systems including Salesforce, Zoho and HubSpot. On the business analytics side Panoply supports a wide range of tools including Tableau, Chartio, Looker, Microsoft PowerBI, Qlik and WebFocus.

On Nov. 5, the San Francisco-based company, launched in 2015, announced that its platform had been integrated with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Promethium

CEO: Kaycee Lai

Promethium is addressing the challenges of self-service data discovery and self-service analytics with its Data Navigation System, a data context platform that launched in October. DNS uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to provide users with the right data to answer the right question in just minutes by locating the data, demonstrating how it needs to be assembled, automatically generating the SQL query to get the right data, and then executing the query.

The system integrates with existing databases, data warehouses, data lakes and cloud-based data sources as well as data management and business intelligence systems. DNS is provided on a Software-as-a-Service basis through a public cloud or a customer’s virtual private cloud, or on-premises deployment.

Based in San Francisco, Promethium was launched in February 2018.

Rockset

CEO: Venkat Venkataramani

Rockset has developed serverless search and analytics technology to perform operational analytics in the cloud that’s not possible with traditional transactional databases or data warehouses.

The Rockset system enables real-time SQL queries on terabytes of NoSQL data, providing a fast and simple way to ingest and query data to serve real-time APIs and live dashboards. The software works with data in a variety of sources including Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Redshift; Apache Kafka; and Google Cloud Storage.

Rockset was co-founded in 2016 by CEO Venkat Venkataramani, previously engineering director on the Facebook infrastructure team, and CTO Dhruba Borthakur, previously an engineer on the Facebook database team and earlier a founding engineer of the Hadoop Distributed File System. The company is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Second Measure

CEO: Michael Babineau

Second Measure markets a self-service data analytics platform that uses consumer transactional data to provide dashboard views into company performance and consumer spending patterns.

Launched in 2015 and based in San Mateo, Calif., Second Measure raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding in February from Bessemer Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs and Citi Ventures.

Skymind

CEO: Chris Nicholson

Skymind is developing artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for use in simulation and predictive analysis applications in logistics, manufacturing, government, finance and call center operations. The company’s Pathmind service, for example, applies AI to simulations running in the cloud.

Based in San Francisco, Skymind was founded in 2014.

Tellius

CEO: Ajay Khanna

Tellius has developed a search-based, AI- and machine learning-powered analytics platform that helps business users query data using natural language and discover insights from huge volumes of data scattered across multiple sources. The company also offers industry-specific systems for data analytics in financial services, retail, healthcare, insurance and communications.

Based in Reston, Va., Tellius was founded in 2015. In February Tellius joined the Google Cloud Partner Program, certifying that its software runs on the Google Cloud Platform.

Zenoptics

CEO: Saurbh Khera

As self-service business analytics becomes more widespread, reports can proliferate and create data management and data governance headaches for business intelligence managers.

Zenoptics has developed a platform that aggregates BI, data and analytics tools in a unifying portal, allowing users to access, share and report data – even when using different reporting and analysis tools – while providing governance mechanisms for management and improving an organization's return on its existing BI investments.

Based in San Jose, Zenoptics was founded in 2015.