DataRPM, the industry pioneer in cognitive business intelligence, today announced that it has closed a $5.1 million Series A funding round. Led by InterWest Partners and joined by CIT GAP Funds, the round will be used to accelerate DataRPM's global go-to-market strategy. DataRPM changes the way individuals work with data, making analytics more accessible and easier to use by solving the two main barriers to the adoption of data analysis - time consuming data modeling and usability. The DataRPM business intelligence (BI) platform removes those barriers, automating the data modeling process and employing a natural language question-and-answer interface to simplify data analysis and visualization.

'By lowering the cost of ownership and emphasizing usability, DataRPM is making business intelligence a no-brainer,' said Khaled Nasr, partner at InterWest. 'Until now, BI solutions and Big Data have largely ignored the data modeling process. DataRPM uses sophisticated algorithms to automate what is otherwise a heavy manual lift. Their combination of affordability and ease-of-use creates the opportunity for companies of all sizes to get meaningful insights from their data.'

Available both on-premise and in the cloud, DataRPM's business intelligence platform pulls data from disparate sources and stores it in distributed computational search index, rather than a traditional data warehouse and provides a natural language and search-based query interface to analyze the data, rather than SQL or other code-based interfaces. As a result, users can easily analyze and visualize their data in near real-time with no limit to the size of data.

The time-consuming and costly process of data modeling represents a huge deterrent for many companies. Data modeling can take as much as 80 percent of the time needed for data analytics and represents a significant cost. Manual data modeling fails to keep up with the rapidly changing business environment, a problem made more severe with the volume, variety and velocity of Big Data. Usability has also plagued the business intelligence space. Tools come with steep learning curves and over-technical interfaces that often keep the users with the most domain expertise from getting the insights they need.

'We have used several BI tools in the past and with each we spent significant amounts of money and time on setup. We had trouble scaling and adapting to business changes. The solutions were also quite technical and required extra analyst involvement, distancing our business users from the data they needed,' said Shankar Rao, CTO of Transaction Network Services (TNS). 'DataRPM came in and in less than 30 days provided us with an end-to-end BI solution with a significant cost of ownership reduction.'

DataRPM uses Cognitive BI to automate manual efforts of the data analytics process from the data modeling to the creation of reports and visualization for analysis. Cognitive BI is a combination of statistical, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. The natural language processor understands the questions and translates them to appropriate BI query and displays the results with relevant visualizations and suggestions. Cognitive BI uses the machine for the heavy lift, allowing the users to spend more time interpreting, understanding and finding insights within their data.

'Our mission is to simplify business intelligence. We provide insights, actions, and results from of the massive amount of data with a machine first, removing the cumbersome manual lift. Pairing our computational search platform with machine learning and natural language interface, greatly simplifies the process of gaining insights from data,' said Sundeep Sanghavi, co-founder and CEO of DataRPM.

DataRPM is founded by serial entrepreneurs and technologists, Shyamantak Gautam, Ruban Phukan and Sundeep Sanghavi, with backgrounds in BI, Big Data and Search from companies that include IBM, Yahoo, and Arthur Andersen.

About DataRPM

DataRPM is the industry pioneer of Cognitive Business Intelligence platform, the next generation of BI technology. DataRPM solves the two biggest problems of business intelligence today viz. a) long, expensive and painful manual data warehousing from disparate data sources and b) significant learning curve of BI software leading to poor user experience and adoption. DataRPM's patent-pending Computational Graph Search technology enables automatic and dynamic modeling of data from disparate sources using semantic algorithms, eliminating the need of manually building complex data warehouses for BI. DataRPM provides a natural language question answering interface to analyze and visualize data that learns from user behavior, eliminating the software learning curve seen in other BI platforms. DataRPM scales for Big Data on commodity hardware and delivers business intelligence in the fastest, cheapest and the most natural way. It is designed to be a one-stop solution for both departmental as well as enterprise scale BI requirements and available in a unique software-as-a-service model both on cloud as well as on-premises. DataRPM is privately held and venture backed. It was recognized as one of the DC's hottest startups by the Tech Cocktail Showcase in 2013 and was ranked as 10 Startups destined to break out in 2014 by Tech.co. It is also ranked as one of the Top 10 Big Data Analytics Company by Enterprise Apps Today.