Stanford University is supporting the startup through its endowment fund.
Metanautix, a big data analyst set up by a group of Google and Facebook alumni, has secured $7m in a series A. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and included Stanford University and Shiva Shivakumar, a former vice-president of engineering at Google.
Metanautix is aiming to make big data analysis accessible to everyone. It is particularly focused on offering this big data analysis across different platforms, and wants to make it easier for companies to understand its customer data even when part of it is stored in-house and part of it in the cloud.
The startup’s software can be installed in-house or run in the cloud, and links the different data sets via SQL – a common programming language to structure databases – which Metanautix calls its lingua franca. The software translates all the data sets into SQL, before algorithms analyse them and output results understandable to the general public. Metanautix does not store any of the data itself.
Currently, the company counts 25 employees and is expecting to launch its product by the end of 2014. Its six customers at the moment include Hewlett-Packard.
Stanford University’s endowment fund is currently worth $18.7bn. In 2013, it raised $931.6m from 82,000 donors, the most donors in its history.
