SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 10, 2014) - UNIFi Software, the only comprehensive data integration solution for the enterprise, today announced it has raised $4.45 million in seed financing, led by Canaan Partners. Other angel investors in the round include Omaha Capital LLC, which specializes in tech startups re-inventing enterprise IT. These funds will be used to scale the business, accelerate development of the data acquisition and integration software, and support its Early Access Program which includes six Fortune 500 companies.
Businesses today are struggling to acquire and structure a deluge of data from disparate sources, including warehouses, spreadsheets, BI systems, marketing tools, and the cloud. Today, if a company wants to understand customer churn or segmentation, a business analyst is reliant on their IT department to acquire, aggregate, and structure all this information prior to their analysis, in the hopes of creating the right data set. Locating, acquiring, integrating, and structuring this data is typically more than 80 percent of the total time spent by analysts. With UNIFi Software, a process that previously took weeks of IT / Business collaboration to complete now only takes a matter of minutes, enabling business constituents to self-serve their enterprise data assets.
"Executives today are confronted with an evolving competitive landscape. Enterprises are becoming more data-driven in their decision making, and to keep their edge, business leaders need rapid and agile access to data," said Rob Carlson, CEO & co-founder at UNIFi. "Waiting months to gain access to new data assets is no longer tenable; the new norm is reacting in minutes or hours. Reaching this bar will only be possible by enabling the business with smart software that doesn't require specialized degrees to wield, or millions of dollars in additional infrastructure to process."
In addition to the funding news, UNIFi is announcing the public launch of its Early Access Program, which features some of the most iconic brands in the media, retail, financial services, and telecom sectors including Disney, Havas Media and ATKearney. These companies were carefully selected to represent the unique challenges and use cases for each of their respective industries. The 8-12 week program pairs a dedicated UNIFi engineer with each partner company to build a specific product that addresses the company's biggest data pain points. Every two weeks, there will be a new release to roll out software enhancements focused directly around the cooperative efforts of the analysts and engineers. At the end of this program, UNIFi and its partners will have built a set of universal products that can be broadly deployed to put the power of big data in the hands of any company, regardless of industry.
"We are very interested in UNIFi's unique value proposition in accelerating our time to insight from Big Data," said Khai Tran, Senior Manager - Digital Media at Disney. "As a business user, UNIFi provides a simple and intuitive user experience that allows us to easily select and connect directly to various data sources, rapidly structure and transform that data, and ultimately deliver value to our business stakeholders in a timeframe of relevance."
UNIFi Software is a visually-driven tool that allows anyone in the enterprise to search for data across the organization, pull it into Hadoop, and structure it so the analysis can all be done in one place. UNIFi is also breaking down the barrier to deployment because it requires no additional hardware. While other offerings require their own hardware to be installed, UNIFi's smart server-based software leverages the horsepower of a company's existing systems for fast deployment and fast usage. This means a business can have the technology up and running within hours, and save up to 10x the cost because they no longer need to pay for hardware or to hire a team of engineers to maintain it.
"We looked at several players in this space, and the enthusiasm from UNIFi's customers was unparalleled. These early customers are quickly realizing the value of delivering a self-service experience that enables the business to search, structure, and rapidly iterate through their data," said Roseanne Wincek, principal at Canaan Partners, who will be joining the Board. "We think enterprise-level data analysis has tremendous growth potential and and believe UNIFi will be an integral part of the adoption of Hadoop."
To learn more, visit http://unifiyourdata.com.
About UNIFi Software
UNIFi was founded with a mission of solving the ubiquitous data acquisition and integration problem that has plagued enterprises since the dawn of data warehousing. The landscape of data analysis that enterprises are embarking on today has significantly advanced in just a few years time. The days of building an enterprise data warehouse to report on financial status or sales over time is no longer a competitive advantage; in today's world doing this well is now considered a cost of doing business.
The core problem that has arisen in this new era of Analytics is business users have not been enabled to participate in the most critical part of the process that has the biggest impact on time to insight. With the advent of the Hadoop data storage and processing platform this has created a unique opportunity to build an application that enables the business to acquire data, integrate it, enrich it, and load it into a flexible environment where agile and iterative analytics can occur.
UNIFi is building the first of its kind business application that combines Big Data integration processing layered with an elegant and simple user experience that will dramatically increase productivity and time to insight.
Contact Information:
Media Contact:
James Christopherson
VSC for UNIFi
james@vscconsulting.com