Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it has received $10.25 million in a Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and FLOODGATE. Ayasdi has created the world's first Insight Discovery platform, a technology that combines advanced mathematics, computer science, and visualization to help organizations find breakthrough insights in large and complex datasets that lead to impactful outcomes.

Ayasdi represents the culmination of a decade long research effort at Stanford, led by renowned mathematics professor and Ayasdi Co-Founder Gunnar Carlsson, and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation. Ayasdi enables organizations of any size to automatically find answers to questions they did not know to ask. Ayasdi overcomes the limitations of biased and query-driven "Big Data" approaches to reveal never-before-seen insights within a matter of minutes.

"At Khosla Ventures, we love companies that take a disruptive approach to transform an industry, as Ayasdi's team is doing in the field of big data," said Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures. "Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform utilizes machine powered intelligence to unearth important -- and previously unattainable -- answers that will help solve some of the most pressing global, social, and economic issues."

Today, "Big Data" Fails to Solve Big Problems Because Query-Based Approaches are Flawed
Governments, businesses, and scientists have spent the last 30 years and billions of dollars attempting to address many of the world's biggest problems by analyzing data. Although Big Data tools have improved over the last 10 years, they have failed to yield breakthrough insights because data analysis methods have not evolved.

Since the creation of SQL in the 1980s, data analysts have tried to find insights by asking questions and writing queries. This approach has two fundamental flaws. First, all queries are based on human assumptions and bias. Secondly, query results only reveal slices of data and do not show relationships between similar groups of data. While this method can uncover clues about how to solve problems, it is a game of chance that usually results in weeks, months, and years of iterative guesswork.

The Ayasdi Breakthrough: Discovering Answers to Questions You Didn't Know to Ask
Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform delivers insights, derived from massive and complex datasets, quickly and without queries. It is the first machine learning platform that combines computer science and a branch of mathematics known as Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that visualizes the entire dataset. Ayasdi's platform explores datasets with hundreds of machine learning algorithms in minutes to automatically discover insights that could not be determined through query-based or ad hoc approaches.

Ayasdi is designed for any type of user -- from domain experts to data scientists and researchers -- and does not require coding or model building. The cloud-based platform scales to meet the most demanding processing requirements and is secured using industry standard encryption. Ayasdi is engineered to complement other Big Data solutions and can work with datasets of any size or type including structured and unstructured.

Ayasdi is now actively working with Global 1000 customers to solve critical issues:

Discover New Drugs: First insight in 8 hours from 100+ hours leading to expedited clinical trials.
Improve Cancer Therapy: Recently, Ayasdi discovered new insights from an 11-year breast cancer dataset that included new sub-populations of breast cancer survivors.
Explore New Energy Sources: Identified data patterns leading to more predictive drilling.
Predict Fraud: Found unknown fraud relationships leading to new preventive measures.
Prevent Terrorist Attacks: Analyzed large corpus of text data revealing hidden patterns.

"The answers to today's most important scientific, business and social problems lie in data," said Gurjeet Singh, CEO of Ayasdi. "The biggest challenge in Big Data today is asking the right questions of data. The power of Ayasdi is its unique ability to automatically discover insights -- regardless of complexity -- without asking questions. Ayasdi's customers can finally learn the answers to questions that they didn't know to ask in the first place. Simply stated, Ayasdi is 'digital serendipity.'"

Industry Leaders Attest to the Power of Ayasdi
"The technology at Ayasdi, based on Topological Data Analysis, is one of the top 10 innovations developed at DARPA in the last decade and is the key to unlocking some of the biggest national security challenges that we face today," said Tony Tether, Former Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

"As one of the largest medical genetics centers in the United States, we conduct pioneering research to identify the genetic susceptibilities -- or predispositions -- of many diseases, including cancer. Ayasdi has already helped us glean new insights that will lead to breakthrough drug discoveries," said Eric Schadt, Director of the Icahn Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai.

"UCSF and Ayasdi are collaborating together to develop new diagnostics and evaluate therapies for traumatic brain and spinal injuries. By utilizing Ayasdi's technology and Topological Data Analysis, we've been able to find insightful patterns in complex data that we are hopeful will lead us to new ways to treat, prevent and manage such traumatic injuries," said Adam R. Ferguson, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, UCSF Brain and Spinal Injury Center.

About Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures offers venture assistance, strategic advice and capital to entrepreneurs. The firm helps entrepreneurs extend the potential of their ideas in breakthrough technologies in clean energy, mobile, IT, cloud, big data, storage, health, food, agriculture and semiconductors. Vinod Khosla founded the firm in 2004 and was formerly a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park, Calif. More information is available at www.khoslaventures.com.

About Ayasdi
Ayasdi brings a pioneering approach to solve the world's most complex problems with the first Insight Discovery platform that automatically discovers insights from data. Founded in 2008 after a decade of research at Stanford, DARPA, and NSF, Ayasdi uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to reinvent how we find knowledge from data without asking questions, writing queries or code. By pairing hundreds of mathematical algorithms with machine powered intelligence, Ayasdi enables end users and domain experts to discover knowledge from massive datasets in seconds to minutes, often finding answers to questions that one would not know to ask of their data. Funded by Khosla Ventures and FLOODGATE, Ayasdi's customers include some of the world's largest organizations in government, financial services, oil and gas, and life sciences. To learn more, visit www.ayasdi.com or follow us @ayasdi.