The much-hyped data analytics startup ClearStory Data has pulled in $9 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures.

It’s still in its early days, but ClearStory is positioning itself as the next evolution of the typical analytics-heavy dashboard, which provides only a “rearview mirror” look into your data.

The problem is that valuable data lives in separate silos and often requires engineers to bring it together. ClearStory is developing the tools to pull in relevant data from Google, Twitter, Facebook and other sites and present it in a visually compelling way.

Silicon Valley-based ClearStory is one of a dozen technology startups that would support data services teams employed by large corporations — or replace data scientists altogether.

It’s certainly a crowded space, but it doesn’t hurt that founder and CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan (pictured, left) has been an investor and advisor to Bay Area startups for years. She has a knack for joining startups that are ripe for acquisition. Prior to founding ClearStory, she worked at Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape for $180 million), Aster Systems (acquired by Teradata for $263 million), and Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6 billion).

ClearStory is still being baked by the company’s 20-person team and will not be generally available until 2013. However, it says what makes ClearStory stand out is its capability to pull data from disparate sources. “Not all data is born and lives inside your company,” Shahani-Mulligan says on the ClearStory blog.

Shahani-Mulligan says that simply retrieving a sliver of data from a single database or website can be a “chore.” ClearStory wants to provide an alternative to the legacy data visualization products on the market, including QlikView and Tableau, which the company blog describes as “cumbersome” and unequipped to handle unstructured data (texts, email, and so on).

Clear Story’s clear focus is its user experience and design. According to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris, who had a sneak peek of the demo,  it’s similar in feel to Platfora’s Hadoop-based software  – “pretty visualizations and lots of dragging, dropping and collaboration.”

[Top image credit:  Bruce Rolff/Shutterstock]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You’ll often hear “big data” startups promising to help companies unlock the true value of their data, but are they delivering?

GoodData, a startup with some heavy-duty venture capital investment, announced a new strategy to take big data out of the hands of IT and into the purview of sales, marketing, and business users.

The cloud-based analytics service brings operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools to business users. Unlike big-name competitors like Oracle and SAP, it emphasizes user experience — CEO, Roman Stanek calls it the “LinkedIn of Business Intelligence.”

Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData.

“You shouldn’t need a Ph.D to use big data,” said Stanek in an interview with VentureBeat. Stanek explained that business users increasingly have sizable budgets to spend on analytics and reporting tools. “The data isn’t in the hands of IT — it’s with Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Marketo,” he said.

With this new direction, GoodData will deliberately circumvent IT. “The only way that innovation gets into the enterprise is through business users,” said Stanek.

The company markets to mid-sized Software as a Service (Saas) vendors, who integrate the technology in their own platforms. The other sweet spot for GoodData is high-tech companies — its customers include Living Social, Groupon, Zendesk, and Pandora. Since the San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2007, over 6,000 customers have signed-on, and it has seen revenue growth of 500 percent year-over-year.

At this point, GoodData’s “BizData Monetization,” as it refers to it, is mainly smoke and mirrors. But with this announcement, the company is rolling out its new “marketplace” product — a library of prebuilt business analytics mashups for sales and marketing teams to create fancy looking, analytics-filled reports.

When the company raised a substantial third funding round in July, it announced it would invest in sales and marketing. It’s paying off. This is a clever marketing move, considering that companies are still in the dark about how to derive dollars from their data. Research firms predict that big data will increasingly be marketing’s problem. According to Gartner, by 2017, a CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.

GoodData’s recent $25 million round was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners.

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Stanek Image via CrunchBase

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The deal is still subject to Netezza shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM will pay $27 a share for the company, which closed at $24.60 a share on Friday.

Netezza provides analytics inside of a data warehousing appliance, which can handle complex analytic queries “10 to 100 times faster than traditional systems.” The deal is an extension of the companies’ existing partnership:

Today, Netezza designs and develops its appliances on IBM systems technology and combined with IBM software powers many applications within organizations.  The two companies have been strategic partners for many years focused on workload optimized systems that deliver integrated systems, software and storage for analyzing vast amounts of complex data.

The acquisition will bolster IBM’s own analytics offering — the company intends to integrate Netezza into its Information Management software portfolio.

Based in Marlborough, Mass., Netezza has around 500 employees worldwide. The company has raised $68 million since it was founded in 2000.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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