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14 Big Data Companies Worth $1 Billion or More

Big data is a big thing. If you’re confused about what “big data” is, we were too, until we wrote this article that explains it in simpler terms. Big data is becoming “a thing” because we’re creating so much of it. Here’s what IBM says about the emergence of big data:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few.

That is an incredible amount of data, and in order to make sense of it, we need to collect it, store it, and build applications to analyze it. We talked before about the most successful big data company there is today, Palantir, and how with their $20 billion valuation they appear to be dominating this space. The reality is however, that there are tons of companies working in big data. Here’s a visual from Firstmark that depicts the “big data landscape”:

Big_Data

Where do you even start if you’re looking to make investments in big data? You could start by looking at all big data companies with a valuation of $1 billion or more. According to the bright minds at CB Insights, there are 14 big data unicorns for you to hunt. The first is of course Palantir which we wrote about before here and here. The other 13 are as follows:

Cloudera

Click for company websiteValue: $4.1 Billion – Founded in 2008, Cloudera has taken in $1.04 BILLION from firms like Google Ventures, CIA backed In-Q-Tel (also backing Palantir) and Intel.  Cloudera is developing the “first unified platform for big data in enterprises” built on “100% open source software and open standards“. With partners like Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel, they’re signing up companies left and right to use their big data platform. Here’s a list of 108 customer success stories you can read through with big names across all industries such as Chevron, Capital One, Monsanto, Samsung, and Cisco.

Nutanix

Click for company websiteValue: $2 Billion – Founded in 2009, Nutanix has taken in $312 million from investors like Khosla Ventures, Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs. The Company “delivers web-scale IT infrastructure by natively converging compute and storage with a patented elastic data fabric blah blah blah“, in other words, they’ll help you store your big data simply and at a lower cost than competing solutions. Just like Cloudera, their solution is sold across all industries and they’ve also partnered with Microsoft and Intel.

Domo

Click for company websiteValue: $2 Billion – Founded in 2010, Domo has taken in $580 million from high profile investors that include Blackrock, Fidelity, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Jeff Bezos. The Company is selling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that connects to any existing system where your data lives. You can connect all your data sources using 100s of “connectors” like the examples provided here. In other words, they store your data in “the cloud” and then give you easy tools to access it from any platform, even your smartphone. It’s a data warehouse for all your “big data” and they host it, not you.

MongoDB

Click for company websiteValue: $1.6 Billion – Founded in 2007, MongoDB has taken in $311 million from investors like Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and In-Q-Tel to develop their “document oriented database“. You know how traditional databases contain tables and fields and such? “Document-oriented databases” aren’t built this way. Instead, they store documents (in formats like XML) as they are and enable you to query them. An XML database is considered to be a “document-oriented database”. MongoDB is the fourth most popular database management system with customers like Craigslist, Adobe, and LinkedIn.

Inside Sales

Value: $1.5 Billion – Founded in 2004, Inside Sales has taken in $201 million to develop “the industry’s leading sales acceleration platform” and it’s no surprise to see that their strategic partner is Saleforce.com along with Microsoft. Their system helps you to prioritize your leads, predict your pipelines more accurately, and motivate your sales team using “gamification” methods. All of this is made possible of course by big data. The system runs anywhere from $95 – $295 per user, per month, so it’s not cheap. Inside Sales says their “customers experience revenue growth of up to 30% in as little as 90 days“. That may be the case but you’d need to have a very short sales cycle.

Mu Sigma

Click for company websiteValue: $1.5 Billion – Founded in 2004, Mu Sigma has taken in $211 million from investors like Sequoia Capital and MasterCard to “help companies institutionalize data-driven decision making“. In other words, they build the tools that let you analyze all that “big data” you have laying around. Mu Sigma has more than 140 Fortune 500 clients using their tools with 3,500 employees (mostly located in Bangalore) developing these tools across 10 industry verticals. The husband and wife team leading Mu Sigma wants to quadruple their $250 million in revenues over the next 4 years.

Deem

Click for company websiteValue: $1.35 Billion – Founded in 2000, Deem has taken in $527 million from investors like Khosla Ventures, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and American Express to build “cloud and mobile applications to help businesses lower expenses, improve operational efficiencies, and increase employee productivity” which they’ve coined “commerce-as-a-service” or (CaaS). Deem has more than 34,000 customers, 100,000 merchants, and 11 million unique products. That’s a whole lot of “big data” to analyze.

Uptake

Click for company websiteValue: $1.1 Billion – Founded in 2014, Uptake has taken in $45 million from investors that include Caterpillar to design a “platform that will transform the world of industry“. The idea here is that you take a complex machine like a train locomotive and then equip it with 100s of sensors that allow you to understand points of failure, maintenance needs, and essentially just generate sh$tloads of big data that you can learn from. This sounds like the start of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) for industrial machinery.

Actifio

Click for company website

Value: $1.1 Billion – Founded in 2009, Actifio has taken in $207 million to develop their “copy data virtualization” technology. The idea here is that when you’ve accumulated all that valuable big data, you want to make a backup copy of it. And it’s not just one copy of your valuable data you need to keep. In some cases, datasets have to have 30 or 40 copies all for various reasons such as compliance. With Actifio, you don’t need to increase your storage capacity by 30X or 40X as it requires much less space. Actifio is selling this solution to some of the biggest companies in the world.

AppDynamics

Click for company websiteValue: $1 Billion – Founded in 2008, AppDynamics has taken in $414 million to develop their “on-premise application performance management SaaS solution for modern application architectures“. What that really means, is this. You have many applications in your firm that are doing things in a timely and expected fashion. The AppDynamics solution tells you if things go out of whack.

SimpliVity

Value: $1 Billion – Founded in 2009, SimpliVity has taken in $276 million from high profile investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to develop their “Omnicube IT infrastructure platform“. Essentially, this platform increases your big data storage capacity by making big data storage more efficient. They guarantee you 90% capacity savings across storage and backup combined. The median data efficiency ratio for their customers is 39:1. How badass is that?

Qualtrics

Click for company websiteValue: $1 Billion – Founded in 2002, Qualtrics has taken in $220 million to develop their SaaS offering that makes your customers happy and your employees more engaged. As soon as we hear the term “employee engagement”, our BS meter goes off the charts, but the Qualtrics solution is used by more than 8,000  of the world’s leading brands and 99 of the top-100 business schools so something must be working here.

MarkLogic

Click for company websiteValue: $1 Billion – Founded in 2003, MarkLogic has taken in $175 million to develop their NoSQL database offering. NoSQL refers to databases that are “non relational” such as MongoDB that we mentioned earlier. As you would expect, the solution is applicable across all industries and MarkLogic claims to be “the only Enterprise NoSQL database” and is used by companies like the BBC, NBC, and a top-5 investment bank.

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