The 10 Hottest Data Analytics Startups Of 2018

Executive management, operations and sales are the three primary roles driving business analytics adoption.

Situational Analysis

The demand for business analytics software continues to grow, with executive management, operations and sales the three primary roles driving business intelligence technology adoption in 2018, according to the Dresner Advisory Service's 2018 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study.

The study also concluded that dashboards, reporting, end-user self-service, advanced visualization and data warehousing are the five most important technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence this year.

As demand for business analytics tools continues to climb, entrepreneurial startups are developing next-generation business intelligence products with new capabilities and functionality.

Here's a look at 10 of the hottest data analytics startups that caught our attention this year.

Arundo Analytics

Top Executive: Tor Jakob Ramsoy, CEO and Founder

Arundo has developed machine-learning software and advanced analytical applications for managing and optimizing the performance of asset-intensive industrial operations. The company's cloud-based, edge-enabled technology is competing in the growing market for Internet of Things analytics.

Founded in 2015, Arundo is based in Houston with offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Oslo, Norway. In January, the company raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing its total financing to $32.5 million.

On Nov. 15, Arundo Analytics teamed up with Dell Technologies to develop an IoT analytics system, incorporating the Arundo Edge Agent software and the Dell Edge Gateway 5100, targeting IoT analysis tasks in the oil and gas and the maritime industries.

Civis Analytics

Top Executive: Dan Wagner, CEO and Founder

Civis Analytics develops data science software that businesses and organizations use to improve how they identify and engage with their customers. The cloud-based Civis Platform, which includes data science tools and a predictive dataset, helps companies develop smarter strategies and make better decisions.

Founded in 2013 and based in Chicago, Civis Analytics reported in August that sales to the public sector, including federal, state and local government clients, had tripled compared to the first half of 2017.

The company's investors include Verizon Ventures, Drive Capital and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. The company lists Airbnb, Verizon and the American Red Cross among its early customers.

Formation

Top Executive: Christian Selchau-Hansen, CEO and Co-Founder

Formation's Customer Goals Management platform is used to analyze customer interaction and decision data to understand customers' behaviors and motivations. Those insights help businesses determine and deliver the optimal customer experience in alignment with their business objectives and automate end-to-end marketing processes.

Formation, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2015 under the name Takt before changing its name in early 2018. Starbucks is an investor in Formation and an early customer.

Gemini Data

Top Executive: Tony Ayaz, CEO and Co-Founder

Gemini Data markets enterprise data infrastructure software for analyzing, virtualizing and converging data across diverse data platforms and sources for analytical tasks in data operations and security.

Founded in 2015, Gemini Data is based in San Francisco.

Iguazio

Top Executive: Asaf Somekh, CEO and Founder

Iguazio was founded in 2014 and launched its Continuous Data Platform in September 2017. The unified data turnkey system ingests, enriches and analyzes data from a wide range of sources, simplifying the development and deployment of data-driven applications.

Earlier this year the company, based in Herzliya, Israel, launched its inaugural channel program in a bid to globally recruit VAR, systems integrator and OEM partners to work with its unified data system.

Iguazio recently debuted Nuclio, a serverless platform for deploying real-time intelligent applications.

Outlier.ai

Top Executive: Sean Byrnes, CEO and Co-Founder

Outlier.ai develops artificial intelligence-based analysis software that collects data from business applications like Adobe, Zendesk and MailChimp and analytical systems such as Amazon Redshift and Google Analytics, and sifts through it to identify insights from unexpected changes and data outliers. The system also monitors business data and provides notification when unexpected changes occur.

Oakland-based Outlier.ai was founded in 2015.

Periscope Data

Top Executive: Harry Glaser, CEO and Co-Founder

Periscope Data provides an advanced, unified data system that data teams use to ingest, store, analyze, visualize and report on data – all from one connected platform – and deliver deeper insight to their organizations. No up-front modeling means business users get answers from their data faster.

In November, the company launched Data Engine by Periscope Data, the first phase of the firm’s next-generation analytics warehouse integration technology. The company says the software will help data teams achieve faster query performance and data ingestion at scale for any kind of workload, regardless of concurrency, data volume or query complexity.

Founded in 2012, Periscope Data is based in San Francisco.

Stratifyd

Top Executive: CEO Derek Wang

Stratifyd offers an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platform that's able to select structured and unstructured data from any source, combine the data and analyze it in real time. The company particularly targets its software for analyzing customer interactions and conducting ad hoc analysis around "customer 360" acquisition and retention initiatives.

Customers include Prudential, Masco, Etsy, and a number of Fortune 100 companies in the financial service, pharmaceutical and technology industries.

Founded in 2015, Stratifyd tripled its revenue in 2017 and nearly doubled its customer base and its employee roster. In March the company moved to a new location in Charlotte, N.C., to accommodate its rapid growth. And in October it received $25 million in Series B funding.

Yellowbrick Data

Top Executive: Neil Carson, CEO and Co-Founder

Yellowbrick Data emerged from stealth in August, unveiling its all-flash analytics and data warehouse appliance that the startup says can handle petabytes of data and is magnitudes smaller and faster than current data warehouse systems.

The company developed a system architecture that's based on flash memory hardware and software developed to handle native flash memory queries. The appliance includes an analytic database designed for flash memory and integrated CPU, storage and networking with data moving directly from flash memory to the CPU.

Yellowbrick Data says its system operates 140 times faster than conventional data warehouse systems for such tasks as retail and advertising analytics, security analysis and fraud detection, financial trading analysis, electronic health records processing and other applications.

Yellowbrick Data, founded in 2014 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., received $44 million in Series A funding in August from DFJ, Google Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Third Point Ventures.

Zepto

Top Executive: Apurva Udeshi, Founder

Zepto bills its AI-powered, self-service data analysis and visualization software as the world's simplest BI and analytics tool. In November, the company announced an upcoming update to its product with enhanced insight capabilities, new natural language processing functionality and an improved file upload feature.

The company was founded in 2016 and launched in 2017.