Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

DataGravity Lands $30 Million From Andreessen Horowitz; Levine Joins Board

For all the press it gets as the next business panacea, Big Data is hard. You can collect and analyze tons of data, but before companies can get anything useful out of it, generally speaking, it’s not uncommon for Ph.D.-level data scientists to be called in to figure out what to do with it, and a lot of heavy-duty software gets applied.

A company called DataGravity, based in Nashua, N.H., is aiming to reduce the complexity of getting useful information from stored data. It announced today that it has taken $30 million in a Series B round of venture capital financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, and Peter Levine, an AH partner, will join DataGravity’s board. Existing partners Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst Partners also particpated in the round.

The company is being a little cagey about what exactly it is doing, but it was started by Paula Long and John Joseph, two execs from EqualLogic, the storage company acquired by Dell in 2008. Long was a founder, and Joseph was vice president of marketing and product management.

Where EqualLogic was all about making the complex business of managing data storage in the enterprise easy enough for a general IT person to handle, DataGravity is aiming to do something similar in the area of extracting useful intelligence from data repositories.

“You’ll hear a lot about companies going after data repositories, but it’s usually done with a big professional services component to it,” Long said. “Usually a third-party company will arrive at your site with three or four people who will mine your data for you for $150 an hour. The companies we want to sell to won’t be able to afford that. Nor will they have the people with the necessary skills internally.”

“These are companies looking for business intelligence, but who are looking for it in a more consumable fashion,” Joseph said.

In a statement, Levine called DataGravity one of the “pioneering companies doing the hard work of solving intractable enterprise challenges.”

DataGravity expects to be more specific about its plans next year. In the meantime, it will use the new round of funding to help build the product and set a go-to-market plan for 2014. It is also actively recruiting people in the fields of data visualization and user experience.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald