Tamr, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., a new company founded by big-data serial entrepreneurs Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker, today unveiled software that dramatically reduces the time-to-value for enterprises that want to exploit all their data. The announcement was made at the DataBeat 2014 conference, which runs May 19-20 in San Francisco.

The company also announced today that it has received more than $16 million in financing led by Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Rich Miner of Google Ventures and Peter Barris from NEA have joined Tamr's board of directors. They join database pioneer Jerry Held, who is chairman of the board, alongside Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker.

Tamr's scalable platform for data curation lets businesses connect and enrich all their data, including internal data sources and external public data sources, as well as feeds from the Internet of Things. In early customer tests, Tamr was able to connect, curate and prepare enterprise data in days or weeks, instead of months or quarters. The Tamr system identifies and connects a massive variety of siloed data across an enterprise by applying advanced machine learning with the insight of human guidance.

'Tamr is groundbreaking,' said Andy Palmer, CEO and co-founder of Tamr. 'It brings to enterprise data the kind of advanced curation that's defined successful data-driven consumer Internet companies. Early Tamr customers are getting some impressive results from the Tamr platform.'

'Tamr creates significant enterprise value,' said Rich Miner of Google Ventures. 'Businesses can't keep up with the number and depth of data sources exploding within their companies. Tamr combines machine learning and corporate knowledge to unlock a unified view of companies' most valued data repositories.'

'Curation is a key theme in NEA's portfolio across a number of consumer-focused verticals, from commerce to content,' said Peter Barris, Managing General Partner, NEA. 'We are thrilled to find in Tamr the right technology and the right team to bring data curation into the enterprise, where there is tremendous opportunity to bring new levels of business insight and velocity to organizations.'

'With Tamr, CIOs and Chief Data Officers can now have visibility of all their data assets and their data experts,' said Tamr chairman Jerry Held. 'We can provide a reusable inventory of all of an enterprise's information assets - including the long tail of data sources that often reside in lines of business, under the radar of central IT organizations.'

How Tamr Works

Tamr's system blends machine learning algorithms with human guidance (for insight into and understanding of the data that only they possess). Tamr automates most data curation tasks, and enables data stewards and curators to intelligently assign exceptions to the right data experts, who collaborate and make the final curation calls using a Tamr dashboard. Tamr is an 'active learning system' that continually learns the more it's used, building an institutional memory and data inventory of bottom-up enterprise information.

Tamr supports RESTful APIs so that an enterprise can use its existing visualization and data science toolkits on top of Tamr.

The Tamr system has been in commercial development for nearly two years, which involved working closely with Fortune 1000 customers.

The system is based on research from MIT, UC Berkeley, Brown University, Brandeis University and Qatar Computing Research Institute. Tamr's co-founders worked previously at building large-scale database systems at companies such as Ingres, Tandem, Vertica Systems, VoltDB and Paradigm4.

For more information about Tamr, follow the company on Twitter or its Insights & News page.

About Tamr, Inc.

Tamr, Inc., connects and enriches the vast reserves of underutilized internal and external data, so enterprises can use all their data for analytics. Tamr combines machine learning algorithms with human insight to identify sources, understand relationships and curate the massive variety of siloed data. Tamr's software is commercially available and deployed in production at Fortune 100 companies. Tamr was founded in 2013 by big-data serial entrepreneurs Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker, who previously co-founded Vertica Systems (acquired by HP); Ihab Ilyas of the University of Waterloo; George Beskales of Qatar Computing Research Institute; Daniel Bruckner of the University of California, Berkeley; and Alex Pagan of MIT. Tamr is based in Cambridge, Mass., and is backed by Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.