ClearStory Data, a company creating an intuitive new way for users to conduct self-driven big data exploration, today announced an investment from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and a number of individual investors. ClearStory Data is making it easy to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the Web for business users to gain quick insights and discover new business opportunities.

Recent IDC projections point to a $16.9 billion market opportunity for big data by 2015 with a slice of this focused on big data platforms including Hadoop. However, a large part of this will also come from new innovations that make it easier for users to leverage publicly available data on the Web and bring it together with a company's own internal data.

As the volume of data across the Web and in businesses' internal repositories continues to explode, the demand for practical data analysis solutions that blend data from different sources is rising. With data specialists in short supply, companies are in dire need of solutions that make diverse data exploration easy to achieve. ClearStory Data is tackling this last mile problem of allowing business users to combine the hoards of publicly available data on the Web with corporate data for users to drive an exploration that uncovers new trends and patterns. The discovery of trends and patterns presents companies with new business opportunities and deeper consumer intelligence.

"In 2011, the global output of data increased 62 percent, yet there's a massive shortage in the number of qualified data professionals to process this data," said Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, CEO and Founder of ClearStory Data. "ClearStory Data is ushering in the era of 'self-driven big data exploration' by making it easier for the masses and not just data scientists and quants to connect, explore and glean intuitive insights from data derived from multiple sources."

ClearStory Data connects to data stored in relational databases, Hadoop, the Web, and third-party sources to unlock and share the combined value of this data. The service combines heterogeneous data access with new visual exploration capabilities on a massive scale, so business users can quickly and easily obtain and disseminate actionable insight.

"Everybody knows you need data from many third-party sources as well as new platforms but nobody offers a great way to bring it together," said Curt Monash, Monash Research. "ClearStory is pursuing a large opportunity."

In addition to seed funding from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures, ClearStory Data has secured investment from notable Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders including Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at Wealthfront; Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, Senior Vice Presidents at Walmart Global e-Commerce and co-founders of Junglee and Kosmix; Tim Howes, co-founder of Rockmelt and ex-CTO Netscape, and Nitin Donde, former executive at EMC, 3Par and Aster Data.

"The big data market is a large and a fast growing opportunity where the key challenge will be the ability for businesses to leverage publicly available data on the Web and bring it together with a company's own internal data seamlessly," said Karim Faris, Partner at Google Ventures. "ClearStory has the team, expertise and experience in data to create a solution that can combine public with private data to extract new and interesting insights for businesses."

ClearStory Data CEO Sharmila Mulligan is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years experience developing major technology companies. Her leadership at Netscape and Kiva Software enabled users to navigate and conduct transactions on the Internet. Her work continued with Opsware (acquired by HP), which resulted in the creation of the Data Center Automation market. Most recently, Mulligan led Aster Data into the big data analytics market opportunity through its acquisition by Teradata. ClearStory Data's co-founders include John Cieslewicz and Vaibhav Nivargi, both experts in big data processing and data-at-scale. Cieslewicz brings real world experience from Aster Data and his doctorate in high-performance data processing. Nivargi adds his expertise in distributed systems and storage systems from Stanford and previous companies in the data market including Aster Data.

"The $17 billion big data opportunity where bringing together internal and external data and easing data exploration will lead to one of the most interesting and valuable aspects of the big data market opportunity," said Anand Rajarman, Senior Vice President at Walmart Global e-Commerce and co-founder of Kosmix and Junglee. "The ClearStory team has a proven track record in big data and is poised to play significant roles in this new market."

ClearStory Data is hiring engineers passionate about improving every user's data experience with expertise in distributed systems, high performance data processing, analytics, visualization, unstructured data and Hadoop. If interested, please email working@clearstorydata.com. To learn more and register as an early user visit www.clearstorydata.com .

About ClearStory Data ClearStory Data is focused on enabling self-driven big data exploration. ClearStory Data is making it easy for business users to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data for more intuitive insights. The ClearStory Data team -- leaders in data processing, analytics, data at scale and visualization -- has decades of experience at Netscape, Opsware, IBM, Aster Data, HP and Teradata. Based in Palo Alto, ClearStory Data is backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures and notable Silicon Valley industry leaders. For more information, visit www.clearstorydata.com .