Greylock, Accel Put Up $12M For Trifacta To Make Big Data More Usable By Humans

By Deborah Gage. This article originally appeared on PEVC Dow Jones VentureWire, December 5, 2013.

Big Data has become abundant, but the work of prepping it so that it can be understood and manipulated by humans is hard–and the more data there is, the harder that job gets.

San Francisco-based Trifacta Inc. has raised $12 million in Series B funding from Greylock Partners and current investor Accel Partners to continue working on this problem, taking its total fundingĀ to $16.3 million. Valuation is not disclosed.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Joe Hellerstein–a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley–said the idea for Trifacta took shape as he waited in vain for people to arrive at UC Berkeley with expertise in the emerging field of data visualization.

His co-founders are Jeffrey Heer, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University whose lab developed a couple of widely used data visualization tools (Protovis and d3.js); and Sean Kandel, a former Ph.D. student at Stanford who worked on Data Wrangler, a tool for cleaning and transforming data into a form that can be read by data analysis and visualization tools.

“There was a time when computers were being operated by people in lab coats–until the rise of the User Interface in the ’70s and ’80s through now–and the same thing is going on with data. We don’t expect that people who work with data are normal people [but that will change],” Mr. Hellerstein said.

Trifacta is still not talking in detail about what it’s doing. But the company describes its technology as a way to improve interactions between humans and machines so that each side learns from the other, and raw complex data is transformed into clean structured data that people can visualize and analyze.

Potential partners, according to Mr. Hellerstein, include Cloudera Inc., which is commercializing the Big Data repository Hadoop; Tableau Software Inc., which lets users visualize data; Pivotal Software Inc., the cloud company spun off from EMC Corp. and VMware Inc., and Platfora Inc., which helps users retrieve and analyze data from Hadoop without help from the IT department.

Competitors include older data integration vendors such as Informatica Corp. and International Business Machines Corp., but those companies’ products emerged at a time when computing was so expensive that data warehouse administrators would reject data that wasn’t carefully vetted to fit, Mr. Hellerstein said.

Now, by contrast, “everything is cheap,” he said, “and the goal is to find a way to pull the signal out of the noise and monetize it.”

Trifacta’s first product is expected early next year. It’s a little delayed, Mr. Hellerstein said, because the market for technical talent in the Bay Area is so tight that hiring has taken longer than expected.

As part of the new funding, Greylock Partner Joseph Ansanelli joins Trifacta’s board. Other investors in Trifacta include Data Collective and XSeed Capital.

http://www.trifacta.com

Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage.