Big Data startup Adatao Inc., is bidding to make business intelligence not just easier, but also more accessible. It’s doing so by attempting to bridge the gap between data scientists and non-techies, in a way that can help the latter to make sense of the massive flood of data their organzations are soaking up.

Adatao has just announced a $13 million funding round led by Andreessen-Horowitz. Its pitch sounds quite familiar though, as it stresses the point that many business intelligence systems are just too expensive, take too long to set up, and are too difficult to use.

But Adatao is trying something different to solve these problems – it harnesses the power of Apache Spark to drive its simplistic, Google Docs-esque interface. Adatao says it chose Apache Spark because it’s far faster at processing data than MapReduce.

The interface makes it easy to sort through whatever data is being fed into Adatao, and lets users collaborate with company data scientists who can put their skills to use by employing machine-learning algorithms to work out causations and relationships that might be buried in the data. Data can also be queried using common languages like Java, Python, Scala and SQL, and there’s even a natural-language query feature which allows users to perform various analytical tasks using simple text commands.

Adatao’s software was released in December, according to a blog post from its co-founder and chief executive Christopher Nguyen. It’s targeted at large enterprises including telcos and financial services organizations, and already claims a handful of Fortune 100 companies as its customers. However, Adatao has plans to cater to smaller customers too, by working with partners that wish to run its software atop of their own data services.

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