Metanautix emerged from stealth today by announcing the finalization of $7M in Series A funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. Additional investors include the Stanford University endowment fund and Shiva Shivakumar, former VP of Engineering at Google. Metanautix delivers a Big Data analytics platform composed of a SQL interface for querying Hadoop data in conjunction with data discovery functionality that empowers analysts to more easily navigate massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. The platform focuses on simplifying the data pipeline between data acquisition and the production of data analytics. As such, Metanautix removes the necessity of combining disparate data sources and thereby delivers the benefits of distributed computing alongside the simplicity of SQL. Users of Metanautix can perform analytics in parallel on structured and unstructured data by taking advantage of an interface that allows users to understand the topography of the data that they are navigating. Founded by veterans of Google and Facebook, Metanautix intervenes in the big data analytics space by allowing users to run analytics on multiple streams of Big Data as noted by CEO Theo Vassilakis below:
The modern enterprise operates on a plethora of data sources. There is great value in using all of these data sources and in providing superior access to ask questions of any data. We’ve made it fast and simple for anyone in an organization to work with any number of data sources at any scale and at a speed that enables rapid business decisions.
Vassilakis notes the ability of Metanautix to manage “any number” of datasets “at any scale” toward the larger end of delivering actionable business intelligence from disparate data sources. Given Vassilakis’s background at Google working on Dremel and the experience of Metanautix’s CTO Apostolos Lerios with processing frameworks for billions of photographic images during his tenure at Facebook, the industry can expect Metanautix to deliver a truly multivalent processing and analytics engine capable of managing heterogeneous data sources of all kinds. Expect more details about the platform to emerge in forthcoming months but, based on the experience of its founders, the Big Data space should brace for the entry of a disruptive Big Data analytics and processing engine that can deliver analytics on massive datasets by means of a radically streamlined operational process. That said, Metanautix will need to find its niche quickly in order to outshine competitors such as Pivotal and Infochimps, the former of which recently announced a collaboration with Hortonworks to enhance Apache Ambari.
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