Big Data startup Adatao Inc. is aiming to make business intelligence accessible to everyone with the release of its first products, after it raised $13 million in venture capital late last year.

The company’s main offering is the Adatao Data Intelligence Platform, which comes with a user-friendly interface and combines a set of predictive applications with the ability to collaborate on problem solving with others. Adatao’s claim is that it gives technically unsophisticated users the ability to query petabytes of data using basic English commands.

Adatao’s CEO Christopher Nguyen told Wired.com he spent two years working as the engineering director of Google Apps before jumping ship, and says the software is also able to anticipate what users will ask for, offering them multiple choices so it can deliver the answers they need much faster. Adatao also comes with an AppBuilder that lets developers build apps and servers that leverage the platform.

Nguyen told the Wall Street Journal APIs are available at every level of the stack, so organizations that have already invested in other analytics applications can just as readily invoke any component of the Adatao platform as any other module in the stack. This addresses one of the primary problems with machine learning technologies, which is making data more broadly accessible to users, Nguyen says.

Adatao’s customers include Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is using the platform for its telecoms customers. Telecoms firms are under pressure to deliver faster Internet connectivity to their customers but at the same time they face budgetary constraints on their infrastructure spending, said Huawei’s Principal System Architect Yue Chen. By using Adatao, telecoms firms are able to allocate resources more efficiently, because they can visualize how web traffic is behaving right down to the second. Adatao’s platform also makes it easier to use software like Apache Spark, Chen said.

Adatao has an established partnership with Databricks Inc., the vendor trying to commercialize Apache Spark, as well as Altiscale Inc., which offers an Hadoop-as-a-service product.

The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bloomberg Beta.

Photo Credit: NEC Corporation of America via Compfight cc