SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 1, 2014) - Today, Data Elite, Silicon Valley's first venture lab for big data startups, is announcing its first of class of participants. These companies are nearing the completion of the three month program and are developing into must have solutions for the enterprise. Big Data continues to disrupt all industries and verticals, and these companies are creating products that will transform the way business is conducted in every sector.
Data Elite is backed by prestigious Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs including The Social+Capital Partnership, Andreessen-Horowitz, Ron Conway, Formation 8 and Anand Rajaraman. The entity has also recruited a board of advisors that include top data scientists from Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Netflix. The venture lab operates as part fund, and part early stage accelerator with a laser focus on finding the best entrepreneurs that were looking for something more than a traditional incubator.
Data Elite selected only seven companies for their first class, from over 200 applicants, whom they believed would change the way data is used. They focused on finding elite entrepreneurs with at least one of these criteria: more than five years of experience, a PhD or a previous successful exit.
Data Elite's inaugural group of portfolio companies includes:
- Weft: Tracks shipping containers using low-cost hardware to make sure packages get where they need to on time and intact.
- Covve: An innovative online application that reinvents the professional address book, it empowers contact owners and allows companies to extract business value from their informal contact network. It's your contacts visualized.
- 451 Degrees 'Graffiti': Next-generation application delivery network that automatically optimizes content in real-time by analyzing user generated comments to enhance engagement, SEO, search traffic and online advertising sales.
- Unravel: An enterprise-grade operations and performance management platform. This technology enables automatic problem detection, rapid troubleshooting and mitigation, application acceleration, as well as smart resource allocation and capacity planning.
- O-RA (Pronounced: "Aura"): A data visualization platform that is creating a new form of the 'digital self' by mapping personal data -- from social networks biometrics daily activities, etc. -- into an aggregate, multi-dimensional, and prescriptive social identity.
- Sensai: The world is awash in unstructured information. At Sensai, we are building a Consensus Discovery Engine to provide insight to business users from that information. Sensai is a novel system that reads millions of pieces of content and instantly derives consensus of opinion on topics that analysts value.
- Pattern EQ: Aims to predict the future behavior of business by understating what drives the business and what impacts the revenue growth, forecasting how revenue streams will change and predicting customer behavior to boost overall customer retention.
Unlike other funds and incubators Data Elite has formed a board of top Fortune 500 customers to give founders a corporate viewpoint and feedback on their product. This symbiotic relationship has led to beta testing of two portfolio companies by a few large publicly traded technology companies.
"Big Data is a large but relatively new space and not everyone understands it well. Traditional incubators didn't have the advice and expertise we needed to be able to grow our solution," say professor Shivnath Babu of Duke University and Kunal Agarwal, Co-Founders of Unravel Data. "Data Elite provided us with access to the best advisors, investors and potential customers that helped us determine the best growth path for Unravel."
"These companies are poised to lead the next wave of billion dollar big data businesses because they're building solutions that will make every aspect of business smarter by using analytics to improve package delivery, SEO and social media," says Stamos Venios, Managing Partner of Data Elite. "We've already seen tremendous development with these companies since joining the program and we believe our model sets them up for success because of the guidance they receive from our elite investors, advisors and corporate partners that are unlike any others."
For more information about Data Elite, please visit: http://www.dataeliteventures.com/
About Data Elite
Data Elite is the Silicon Valley's first venture lab and early-stage fund focused on data sciences. Data Elite was founded by Tasso Argyros, founder of Aster Data which was sold to Teradata for $300M in 2011, as well as Stamos Venios, who has held M&A and investment positions with companies in Europe and Israel. The fund is backed by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors such as The Social+Capital Partnership, Andreessen Horowitz, Formation8, Ron Conway, and Anand Rajaraman. Data Elite's six-month program provides top scientists and repeat entrepreneurs with the financial resources, customer network, and technical counsel to build and grow world-class big data businesses.