Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) has raised $30.6 million in Series B venture funding, led by IVP with participation from Citi Ventures, GE Ventures, and existing investors Khosla Ventures and FLOODGATE. In conjunction with the financing, Steve Harrick from IVP will join Ayasdi's Board of Directors.

Six months after the company's initial launch, Ayasdi's customers and collaborators include General Electric, Citigroup, Merck, Anadarko, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Mount Sinai Hospital, Texas A&M University, and Harvard Medical School.

'The Big Data market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years, and the new frontier will be pioneered by the technologies that leverage the strengths of both humans and machines,' said Steve Harrick, General Partner at IVP. 'In a remarkably short time, Ayasdi has not only developed a breakthrough technology, but also gained an impressive foothold in the market. I am looking forward to working with their leadership team to build upon that momentum and pursue the company's next stage of growth.'

Transforming How the World Uses Data
Before Ayasdi, organizations typically extract value from data by building a Big Data infrastructure and employing large teams of highly trained Data Scientists who spend months, and sometimes years, asking questions of data to find breakthrough insights. The probability of discovering these insights is low because there are too many questions to ask and not enough data scientists to ask them. Once found, deploying solutions to help enterprises solve critical problems can further lengthen the process.

Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform is designed for domain experts and business people to automatically find insights from complex data and operationalize them to help enterprises solve difficult and expensive problems. Ayasdi's unique approach combines advanced machine learning techniques with a branch of mathematics called Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to discover insights without coding, scripting, or manually querying. Ayasdi's technology also utilizes an ensemble of best-of-breed algorithms, automatically maps entire datasets (both structured and unstructured), and quickly provides the most relevant and statistically valid insights.

'We're excited by Ayasdi's unique capability to let users find insights automatically from large, complex data sets,' said Ramneek Gupta, Managing Director, Citi Ventures. 'Their ability to abstract away complexity, thereby making powerful machine learning tools accessible to ordinary business users, is particularly promising. We're looking forward to leveraging Ayasdi's technology on several use cases within Citi's Center of Excellence for Data Intelligence.'

Advancing Machine Learning and TDA to Enable the 'Brilliant Enterprise'
'This is a critical time in the evolution of how organizations utilize data -- a time when some will take a great leap forward. Ayasdi's vision is to transform how the world uses data to solve problems and to enable every organization to become a Brilliant Enterprise,' said Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO at Ayasdi. 'Brilliant Enterprises will effectively find insights and operationalize them to create billions of dollars in growth, bring down costs, and solve many of our world's most complex and expensive problems.'

With this latest investment, Ayasdi will accelerate the development of machine learning systems and TDA-based approaches to help organizations achieve brilliant outcomes. Ayasdi will do so through:

Continued automation of Ayasdi's machine learning techniques to discover insights from complex data in a matter of seconds;
Enhanced operational workflow capabilities for integrating Ayasdi into core enterprise IT environments and real-time business operations;
Access to preloaded public datasets providing immediate insights for enterprises to pair with their proprietary datasets; and
Doubling the size of the company within the next 12 months.

New Customers and Partners Align to Ayasdi's Vision for a Brilliant Enterprise
Ayasdi's customers and collaborators use its technology to discover new drug therapies, uncover the causes of diseases, root out financial fraud, accelerate energy exploration, discover customer segmentation, and much more. Additionally, Ayasdi's platform is engineered to complement other Big Data solutions.

General Electric: 'Through powerful analytic models developed over a decade at Stanford, Ayasdi lets you find the needle in a haystack you didn't know was there, quickly. For GE and our customers with vast amounts of industrial data, Ayasdi's technology will be a powerful tool for predictive analytic models that can drive billions of productivity and efficiency savings,' said Jonathan Ballon, Chief Strategy Officer, GE.

Cloudera: 'Cloudera pioneered the business case for Apache Hadoop and as the market leader with tens of thousands of nodes under management and growing, we are excited to partner with Ayasdi. Our market leading big data platform, together with Ayasdi's application and machine-learning algorithms, enables our joint customers to generate full value and insight from their complex data at lightning speed,' said Tim Stevens, Vice President, Business Development, Cloudera.

About Institutional Venture Partners (IVP)
With $4 billion of committed capital, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States. Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in over 300 companies, 94 of which have gone public. IVP is one of the top-performing firms in the industry and has a 32-year IRR of 43.2%. IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. Since its inception, IVP investments include such notable companies as ArcSight (HPQ), Buddy Media (CRM), ComScore (SCOR), Concur Technologies (CNQR), Dropbox, Fleetmatics (FLTX), HomeAway (AWAY), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Kayak (KYAK), LegalZoom, LifeLock (LOCK), Marketo (MKTO), MySQL (ORCL), Netflix (NFLX), Polycom (PLCM), Seagate (STX), Shazam, Synchronoss (SNCR), Tivo (TIVO), Twitter, and Zynga (ZNGA). For more information, visit http://ivp.com or follow IVP on Twitter: @ivp.

About GE Ventures
GE Ventures is committed to identifying, scaling and accelerating ideas that will make the world work better. Focused on the areas of software and analytics, advanced manufacturing, energy and healthcare, GE Ventures helps entrepreneurs and start-ups succeed by providing access to GE's technical expertise, capital and opportunities for commercialization through GE's global network of business, customers and partners. GE Ventures is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. For more information, please visit http://www.ge.com/company/ge-ventures.

About Citi Ventures
Headquartered in Palo Alto, with offices in New York and Shanghai, Citi Ventures is a unit of the global financial services company Citigroup. The Citi Ventures team partners with Citi businesses internally and with leading companies externally to identify, invest in, develop, and commercialize the highest new growth opportunities around the world that directly support Citi's global business strategy. For more information visit ventures.citi.com.

About Ayasdi
Ayasdi is transforming how the world uses data to solve complex problems. Founded in 2008 after a decade of research at Stanford, DARPA, and NSF, Ayasdi is pioneering a new approach for enterprises to automatically discover and operationalize insights from their data. Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA) combined with an ensemble of machine learning techniques to enable data scientists, domain experts, and business people to achieve value from their data without the need to write code, queries, or ask questions. Funded by Khosla Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, GE Ventures, Citi Ventures, and FLOODGATE, Ayasdi's customers include General Electric, Citigroup, Merck, Anadarko, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and Mount Sinai Hospital. To learn more, visit www.ayasdi.com or follow us @ayasdi.