8 Big Data Startup Companies to Watch

With ever growing consumption of smartphones and internet in India, we can see that how we are generating data every micro second while using mobile apps, while ordering that camera, or by simply posting a status on social media platforms, so-on-and-so-fourth.

With such massive connectivity via various platforms, it is no wonder that enterprises are carrying whopping big data, which is growing at multifold rate every day. Hence, the requirement for making a business decision is shifting from hindsight-based decision making to a foresight-based approach.

Now, the next-gen enterprises need innovative big data solutions than of traditional ones, typically offered by large enterprises. According to a recent study by NASSCOM and Blueocean, the analytics market in India is expected double from $1 billion in last fiscal to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18. Blueocean Market Intelligence President Ashwin Mittal said growing economy, increasing penetration of internet and mobile have formed the basis of analytics growth in India. “While the BFSI, eCommerce, telecom are the trendsetters in analytics adoption, sectors such as retail, manufacturing, media and advertising are also moving towards adopting it.

Paying heed to these insights and the need of innovative solutions, a few India-based startups are disrupting the traditional big data market with their invigorating ideas and reaping the revenues.

Analyze Social Media Conversations with Germin8

One such innovative startup is Mumbai-based Germin8, a data analytics company that helps brands with social media measurement and monitoring solutions by analyzing conversations in real time.

Germin8 Social Listening, proprietary stakeholder insights, engagement and social media listening platform collects and analyses conversations in real time from public sources and private sources, and converts them into industry-specific actionable insights.

The startup basically helps companies to make informed decisions in real-time, based on what their stakeholders are saying in the public domain such as social media, news sites as well as emails and chats. The Mumbai-based company was founded by father son-duo of Raj and Ranjit Nair in 2012 and has about 130 clients including Johnson & Johnson, MTV and GroupM among others.

Machine Guided Analytics Workflows with Xurmo

Bangalore-based Xurmo Technologies, a data infrastructure and analytics company offers an enterprise platform for end-to-end machine guided big data analytics. Xurmo’s data analytics determines the natural structure of raw data and stores it in a patented format.

“Consolidating and processing raw data for actionable insights is a problem that several organizations fail at in their big data journey”, said Sridhar Gopalakrishnan, Founder and CEO, Xurmo Technologies.

For its innovation in big data analytics, the company got selected as a ‘2015 TiE50 Start-up’ for the TiE50 Technology Awards Program. TiE50 is open to all technology start-ups worldwide. The company was founded in 2009 in close collaboration with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. The Xurmo platform was launched in early 2014 after five years of R&D in the areas of data modeling, data architecture, machine learning, and personalization. The platform has been developed on a patented poly-schema database, called FabricDB which enables the platform to offer Machine-Guided analytics workflows.

Get Simple with Crayon Data

Founded by graduates from IIM-Calcutta in 2012, Crayon Data is a big data platform that helps enterprises to connect their internal data with the unstructured data outside, including social media. Its product, SimplerChoices platform creates a taste graph for each customer based on their tastes, influence and context that can be used by banks, hotels, retailers and telecom companies to deliver personalized choices to their customers. Understadably, an algorithm called the WhiteBox, Simpler Choices, takes massive data, cleans it up and presents only actionable insights to the enterprises.

The Singapore-India (Chennai) based Crayon Data was one of the top 50 finalists shortlisted for the Code_n Awards in Europe’s largest technology showcase Cebit 2014.

Qubole—Boon for Small Teams

A big data as service company, Qubole, founded by former Facebook engineers Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma, is based on Apache Hadoop, an open source software framework, and offers cloud-based platform Qubole Data Service (QDS), a solution that focuses on making analytics accessible to all kinds of enterprises by eliminating the operational challenges of running big data analytics to make it accessible, easy, fast, and inexpensive.
Qubole’s flagship product, QDS, runs the Hadoop infrastructure where both developers and non-developers can easily analyze and collaborate with their company’s data. QDS provides organizations the option to use cloud infrastructures such as Google Compute, Amazon Web Services and Azure to provide users with self-service access to data and helps cut capital expenditures for maintaining hardware and support staff.

Google of Big Data: Dataswft

Bizosys Technologies-owned Dataswft delivers sub-second results for analytical queries. Machine learning and Interactive queries on 100’s of terabytes data/billions of records comprising machine data such as readings from sensors, wearables, clickstreams, server logs, etc. both current and historical is possible with Dataswft in your IT stack.

The Bangalore-based startup, Dataswft is a machine Data Lake - a centralized reservoir for all your machine data with its indexing architecture that reduces dependency on a solely in-memory processing. The platform allows queries to go beyond datanodes, extending to objectstores such as S3 storage.

Formcept: Accessible to Everyone

Formcept is a unified data analysis platform that helps enterprises to get actionable insights from their data faster, thereby, significantly reducing the time taken to convert data into decisions. The platform not only reduces the entire data pre-processing time, but also helps in deriving insights faster using the pre-packaged processing and predictive models for textual and statistical data analysis.

The company provides a unified interface for storing and querying datasets which supports batch processing, stream processing and interactive analysis out of the box. It is built on top of NoSQL technologies, like- HDFS, HBase for storage, systems like Map-Reduce, Spark, Shark and Storm for data processing and utilizes the power of graph database, key-value store and index store to provide a seamless experience for the end users. Customers can kick-start their ‘Big Data’ Applications using APIs without worrying about the underlying complexity.
Focused on making data analysis accessible to everyone, the company also bagged Frost & Sullivan 2014 ‘Data Analysis Platforms’ award last year in the New Product Innovation Leadership category.

E-commerce and DataCulture

Players in e-commerce have set the benchmark in India for applying technology and completely reshaping consumer shopping behaviour – from being passive and supply-led, to now where it is active enough to being in everyone’s fingertips. With this industry’s rapid pace, Karthik Sridhar founded DataCulture to enable logistics and merchants firms to keep pace with the technology.

The analytics startup, DataCulture focuses on the fields that are closely aligned to digital commerce. The startup is looking at empowering the allied services like logistics and merchants to leverage the same big data technology that the e-commerce companies use and help them catch up to increased demand and scale in business throughput.

While we see a lot of big data players emerging, their area of focus has been in purely enabling faster data processing, and the infrastructural environment. “DataCulture’s real work begins at that point, where we want our customers to realize that having a big data infrastructure is great, but if you haven’t applied math and data science deep enough to leverage and extract value, it doesn’t impact business results and eventually leads to dissonance,” explained Karthik Sridhar, founder, CEO, DataCulture.

He further said that the company’s platform has specific vertical products addressing these services, and is eager to ‘democratise’ the power of data analytics for SMEs.

Telecom and mCarbon

Telcos often find themselves at the crossroads of being efficient connectivity providers and enabling new revenue opportunities through innovation and collaboration. The kind of data the telcos are sitting on is user’s geography, age, sex, liking, disliking, food habits, buying patterns – everything, and one can do wonders with this data. Addressing this need, Noida based mCarbon’s revenue uplift portfolio strives to empower telcos with products/services that generate additional revenue by implementing products like call completion suite, interactive-end of call notification, talktime commerce and gifting etc.

The company’ usage and revenue uplift solution is powered by its proprietary Greenroom platform that analyses millions of data points across various customer touch points within a network every day. It uses core analytics engine to derive meaningful information out of it and improve the penetration and revenue uplift as a whole. “Analyzing the data available is helping us to understand the diverse user behavior across geographies and operators and we collectively use it to design more valuable solutions for the customers during the entire lifecycle of the customer over a particular network,” said Rajesh Razdan, CEO & Founder mCarbon,

The data analyzed can be of various types including calling patterns, data usage , charging and recharging period that help create a micro profile of every customer that can be leveraged for giving diverse set of contextual services to the customer.