The 10 Top Big Data Startups Of 2019 (So Far)

Sales of big data and business analytics solutions are expected to reach $189 billion this year and that industry growth is spurring a steady stream of startups developing innovative big data products.

Digital Transformation Initiatives Are A Key Driver For The Big Data Industry

Worldwide revenue for big data and business analytics solutions is expected to reach $189.1 billion this year, up 12 percent from 2018, according to a semiannual forecast from International Data Corp. That growth will continue at a CAGR of 13.2 percent over the next five years, reaching $274.3 billion in 2022.

Digital transformation will be a major driver of big data tech sales, according to IDC, as executive-level initiatives and reassessments of business practices lead to greater demands for access to data and analytical insights.

While established vendors like Tableau, Oracle and Microsoft will account for a big chunk of those sales, startups with innovative big data technologies are sure to capture a piece of the big data market. Solution providers who want to offer their customers the latest software and services in business analytics, data management, data science and machine learning to tackle their big data challenges should take notice.

See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest Big Data Startups of 2022

Here are CRN's picks for the top big data startups so far 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 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, 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.

dotData

CEO: Ryohei Fujimaki

dotData has developed an end-to-end data science automation platform that the company says "accelerates, democratizes and operationalizes" the entire data science process. The company targets its software applications for use cases in customer analytics and marketing, risk and governance, supply and demand, asset management and business automation.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., dotdata was spun off from NEC in 2018. Earlier this year the company debuted Enterprise Version 1.4 of its software with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and AI-powered feature engineering for geo-temporal data. The company also recently debuted dotDataPy with Python support.

Dremio

CEO: Tomer Shiran

Dremio's Data-as-a-Service platform empowers users to discover, curate and share data, regardless of its location or structure, helping to bridge the gap between data engineers and business users. The software uses Apache Arrow, an open-source, cross-language development platform for in-memory data, to increase query performance.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Dremio was launched in 2017 by the founders of the Apache Arrow and Apache Drill projects. Last year the company grew its annual recurring revenue by a factor of 10 from 2017 and increased its enterprise customer base by a factor of five.

Hammerspace

CEO: David Flynn

Hammerspace is a player in the growing Data-as-a-Service space with technology that provides access to data across a hybrid, multi-cloud IT system. The company's software-defined Hybrid Cloud Data Control Plane, which relies on metadata-driven machine learning, virtualizes and abstracts data from multiple storage systems – both on-premise and cloud-based – making it available to any application, service, container or developer.

Founded in 2018, Hammerspace is headquartered in Los Altos, 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 in February raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs and Citi Ventures.

Starburst Data

CEO: Justin Borgman

Starburst Data provides an enterprise-ready distribution of Presto, the open-source, high-performance SQL engine, along with related services and support. Starburst offers Presto as a SQL-on-anything analytics platform, performing interactive queries across a wide variety of data sources including the Hadoop file system, Amazon S3 storage, Kafka, and database systems like MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and MongoDB.

Boston-based Starburst Data was founded in 2017.

SlicingDice

CEO: Gabriel Menegat

SlicingDice offer s a cloud-based, full-service data warehouse and analytical Database-as-a-Service. The company's fully managed data warehouse service includes optional built-in tools for data integration, exploration, visualization and machine learning.

Founded in 2017, SlicingDice has headquarters in San Francisco and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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.