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What you missed in Big Data: Holiday cheer
The venture capital community showed its spirit of giving last week with a flurry of investments in the analytics ecosystem that made the holiday extra cheerful for a few lucky startups. First on the list was MapAnything Inc., which received a $7.3 million investment from Greycroft Partners and four other backers to accelerate the adoption of its location-based data visualization service for Salesforce.com.
It’s positioned as a niche alternative to the geospatial analytics toolkit that earned another up-and-coming startup called CartoDB Inc. $23 million in funding a few months ago. MapAnything collects information about an organization’s leads and customers from its Salesforce.com account and overlays key details over a Google Places chart to provide a high-level view of revenue opportunites. The outfit says that its service can be used for anything from planning strategic expansions to finding conference venues.
Semantic Machines Inc. claims that an equally wide variety of applications stand to benefit from its speech recognition technology, which attracted $12.3 million in financing against the backdrop of MapAnything’s new round. The software uses a combination of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to achieve what is described as a much deeper understanding of human communications than what existing alternatives like Apple Inc.’s Siri possess. The startup plans to make its capabilities available for developers in order to facilitate the creation of business applications capable of handling queries that currently require a human operator to fulfill.
Semantic Machines shares that focus on automating data mining with Palantir Technologies Inc., the biggest beneficiary of last week’s investment spree. The secretive analytics powerhouse raised another $200 million as part of a funding round that started about five months ago and now stands at a total of $880 million. The financing reportedly puts its valuation at over $20 billion, an impressive figure even in unicorn-packed Silicon Valley.
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