Guavus raises $30M for big data analytics

Investor Growth Capital leads round, with participation from QuestMark Partners

If one person (like myself) can produce 1000 photos in a year, imagine what big corporations are capable of producing in the form of digital data - forms, reports, blog posts, videos, images, etc.  

We live in a data-rich global economy. That means we need software platforms that can help us make sense of the data without taking days or weeks, let alone months. Given this tidal wave of data, it's not suprising that each day there's another big data company raising a large round of financing to solve this problem.

Guavus announced Thursday morning that it's raised $30 million in financing, led by Investor Growth Capital (IGC), with participation from QuestMark Partners and existing investors Artiman Ventures, Sofinnova Ventures and Intel Capital. This brings the total round of financing to $78 million.

Much like other big data companies, Guavus' platform takes in the data, applies intelligent algorithms to it and allows companies to discover insights about the data. The difference between Guavus and other big data companies that have recently raised rounds is that Guavus is focused on carriers and big communications service providers. Health Catalyst, another big data company that just raised $33 million this week, focuses on servicing hospitals and the health care industry. Another company that recently raised a round of $20 million for its business analytics solution is Platfora.

San Mateo, Calif-based Guavus targets big communications service providers that have data about their networks, devices, content and subscriber analytics. You can imagine how much data a carrier is working with these days, particularly with the explosion of data driven by smartphones (my 1000 photos, for example), and tablets. By using Guavus, carriers can have quicker access to information upon which they can make decisions. 

"Most of the data is being continuously generated and therefore, Guavus' appraoch is to analyze the data as it comes as as opposed to just storing it and then going and searching for that data," said Anukool Lakhina, CEO and founder of Guavus, in an interview. This process enables companies to make sense of the information in a more timely and cost-effective manner.

For example, typically consumers don't really understand how much data they use, yet they're charged based on their usage. Consumers then call into customer service departments to understand their bill. But heretofore, customer service agents didn't have enough information to advise customers on what was happening with their bill.  "Guavus can help customer service people with insights about their data usage and explain why they have certain charges," Lakhina explained.

Guavus is currently deployed at two of the top three mobile operators and three of the top backbone carries, said Lakhina. The Guavus platform helps these companies save money by optimizing their network capacity. "Usually customers see an ROI within the first six months," said Lakhina. "And, during trial stage, they've already found millions of dollars of savings."

According to the company, a "traditional enterprise business intelligence solution requires tens of millions of dollars IT budget, can take years to deploy and even longer to realize a return on investment with actual business benefits not known until the system has been up and running for several months to years." With Guavus, the time to uncover knowledge happens in a much shorter time period.

(Image source: successfulworkplace.com)