Trifacta, the data transformation company, today announced the finalization of $25M in Series C funding. The funding round was led by a new investor, Ignition Partners, with additional participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. As a result of the investment, Frank Artale, Managing Director of Ignition Partners, will join the Trifacta board of directors. The Trifacta Data Transformation Platform enhances the productivity of data analysts and scientists by transforming Big Data into a structure that renders it easier to analyze, visualize and manipulate. The Trifacta platform’s predictive interaction technology allows users to visualize Big Data, interact with different data visualizations and take advantage of machine-learning based predictions regarding data transformations and analytics of interest. The platform aims to deliver transparency regarding the data in question, agility with respect to the user’s ability to interact with Big Data, predictive intelligence based on machine learning about the efficacy of user interactions with data and scalability marked by the ability to interact with large, heterogeneous datasets. As told to Cloud Computing Today by Trifacta CEO Joe Hellerstein, Trifacta customers can take advantage of the platform’s ability to cleanse and organize Big Data in conjunction with other enterprise software platforms such as SAS, for example. That said, Trifacta itself offers its own universe of tools for facilitating insights with respect to Big Data and, unlike many business intelligence or analytics platforms, is designed specifically for the purpose of transformation, data discovery and visualization of massive datasets. Today’s announcement about Trifacta’s Series C funding comes hot on the heels of a March 2014 partnership with Cloudera to jointly deliver the Trifacta Data Transformation platform in conjunction with Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. To date, Trifacta has raised a total of approximately $45M in funding. Given partnerships such as Cloudera in hand, and $25M in Series C funding that comes roughly 6 months after its Series B capital raise of $12M, the industry should expect Trifacta’s traction amongst Big Data customers to skyrocket as news about its ability to transform Big Data into a usable form that accelerates the development of actionable business intelligence proliferates.
Category: Trifacta
Trifacta’s Big Data Transformation Platform Leverages Machine Learning To Streamline Data Analysis
Hot on the heels of its $12M Series B funding in December, Trifacta recently announced the general availability of the Trifacta Data Transformation Platform. Based on its innovative Predictive Interaction™ technology, the Trifacta Data Transformation Platform uses visualization and machine learning to streamline and enrich user-level interactions with Big Data such as the type experienced by data scientists and business analysts. Trifacta’s Predictive Interaction technology features three components: (1) visualization of big data that empowers analysts to specify trends, values or analytics of interest; (2) interaction whereby the analyst responds to the data visualizations; and (3) prediction of the data transformations suggested by user interactions, with corresponding visualizations of the data transformation. The platform’s machine learning capability iteratively responds to user behavior to generate analytics of increasing value and interest. As a result, users can swiftly proceed from a raw, unprocessed archive of big data to incisive analytics and visualizations without the pre-processing, data cleansing and data transformation steps that are typically necessary to obtain deeper insights into about the data in question. The Trifacta Data Transformation Platform enables business analysts without scripting experience to derive nuanced insights about big data and additionally amplifies analyst productivity by means of its unique visualization and machine learning technology platform. Trifacta Customers include Lockheed Martin and Accretive Health, both of which remarked on the way in which the Trifacta Data Transformation Platform accelerates the data analysis lifecycle and streamlines user workflows. Trifacta’s technology is unique in the Big Data industry because of its focus on streamlining and enhancing the end user of big data analysis. Given the ubiquity of data visualization in the industry, much of the platform’s ability to differentiate itself will hinge on the sophistication of its predictive modeling and machine learning capabilities.
Trifacta Finalizes $12M In Series B Funding For Data Transformation Platform
Trifacta today announced the finalization of $12M in Series B funding in a round led by Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. Trifacta, a data transformation provider, delivers a solution that helps customers standardize and transform data into a form that optimizes the degree of actionable business intelligence that can be derived from that data. More importantly, the solution features a user experience that enables analysts and data scientists to leverage machine learning to transform data as desired while minimizing the writing of scripts and the execution of complex operations on datasets. The Trifacta platform strives to deliver a highly intuitive user interface for transforming data that enables business analysts to engage data in highly sophisticated ways while concurrently improving the productivity of data scientists. As such, the solution tackles two, often overlooked problems in the data analytics space, namely, transformation of data into a useable form, and improving the productivity of analysts engaged in the work of that transformation. Trifacta’s data visualization functionality and algorithmic, machine learning-based mapping of user interactions with data works to understand, recommend and optimize workflows for interacting with data. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, Trifacta CEO Joe Hellerstein noted that the solution is currently in public Beta amongst customers from a wide range of verticals, all of whom face the same problem of transforming their data into a form that facilitates development of nuanced, actionable analytics and visualizations. Today’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Trifacta to $16.3M.
Trifacta Closes $4.3 Million In Series A Funding; Seeks To Make Big Data Insights More Accessible
This Thursday, Trifacta came out of stealth mode by announcing $4.3 million in Series A funding led by Accel Partners, with additional participation from X/Seed Capital, Data Collective and angel investors Dave Goldberg, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. Trifacta’s mission is to “radically enhance productivity for data analysis” by delivering a solution catered to the human resources responsible for gleaning business significance out of data analysis. Based on the premise that the cost of skilled data analysts continues to rise while the costs of storage and computation become progressively lower, Trifacta intends to enhance the ability of analysts to more effectively manipulate, mine and derive insights from massive amounts of structured data. In an interview with VentureBeat, TriFacta’s co-founder and CEO Joe Hellerstein elaborated on the company’s mission as follows:
There is a lot of talk about engines and algorithms for unlocking value in data. But real value comes from the people who drive the analysis. The question is how you get data into the form where people can get some value out of it.
Similarly, Ping Li, head of Accel’s Big Data fund elaborated on his fund’s interest in Trifacta by noting:
The world doesn’t need another Hadoop or SQL company. The biggest problem with big data is around the ability to get information out of it. That gap is huge, and it’s not going to be solved anytime soon. This is really the soft underbelly of big data right now.
Hellerstein and Ping Li both point to the importance of facilitating access to business insights from Big Data in contrast to merely delivering an enterprise grade storage solution. Trifacta was founded as a result of collaborations between computer scientists at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. The company’s leadership team features cofounder Joe Hellerstein, former Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Jeffrey Heer, Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer and Sean Kandel as CTO, whose Ph.D. dissertation research at Stanford University examined interactive products for manipulating data. CXO Jeffrey Heer is also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the Stanford Visualization Group. Specific details of the company’s solutions remain under wraps at present, though Trifacta’s website reports that the company is busily preparing details of solutions for public release while it gears up for a round of aggressive hiring.
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