Unstructured data: It's the oceans of disconnected information that gather on the hard drives and in the clouds of almost every business.
But it ends up being almost worthless until you know how to connect the dots to develop an action plan. And that usually requires brining in some external data from a variety of external sources, including news feeds, social media and government data sets.
That's where Zdaly is making its mark. The Houston-based startup's software identifies and grabs data from internal and external sources, cleans it up, maps it and applies analytics to give business leaders potentially valuable insights.
Now the company, which already counts several Fortune 100 companies as clients, has raised new money to expand its offerings and relocate its headquarters to Austin in 2019. The startup has raised new funding from Austin's S3 Ventures and Moneta Ventures, a California firm with an Austin office.
The company and firms didn't disclose the size of the investment. But Zdaly founder and CEO Rajdeep Golecha told Inno that it was a seven figure deal, and he said the company will likely look to raise $7 million to $10 million around the end of 2019.
"Fundamentally, five months back, we were quite keen on the idea of bootstrapping the company," he said.
But mutual connections led Golecha to take meetings with S3 Ventures and, later, Moneta Ventures because of their portfolios and their understanding of his company's use of AI. He said moving to Austin just makes sense for a company that is driven by data skills.
"We’ve looked in Texas and outside," he said. "We got to a point where we felt the technology talent in Austin is probably one of the best of all the locations in Texas.”
The company will, however, retain an office in Houston, where it has big oil companies as clients. Zdaly currently has 12 full-time employees, including some in California and India. Golecha said he plans aggressive growth next year and more than doubling the team by adding positions in data science and sales.
Aaron Perman, VP at S3 Ventures, said he immediately saw the value that automating data analysis could provide for large-scale enterprise businesses.
“The ROI that you can get by enabling it to be so much faster and more efficient…” he said. “It just can add a lot of value.”
Aasim Hasan, a partner at Moneta Ventures' office in Austin, said he first learned about Zdaly from Farhat Ali, a former colleague in Silicon Valley who was CEO of Fujitsu America and is part of Zdaly's advisory board.
“Zdaly enables businesses to derive insights from data faster, more accurately, and for a fraction of their existing costs," he wrote in a statement. "By using Zdaly’s data-driven insights to make better multi-million and multi-billion dollar business decisions, Zdaly’s customers are unlocking a tremendous amount of value from data."
