If you've been looking for better ways to process, discover and query data from your Amazon S3 cloud storage, there's a new startup in the Boston area that might just have what you're looking for.
Chaos Sumo, a provider of "smart object storage" service for S3, announced on Tuesday it has raised a $1 million seed round from Stage 1 Ventures, a Waltham-based venture capital firm that has backed a number of Boston-area startups, including Talla, Freight Farms, Promoboxx, Viralgains and Referral Mob. The services goes into beta on June 26.
Chaos Sumo co-founders Thomas Hazel and Les Yetton were at Deep Information Sciences, a Boston startup founded by Hazel that Yetton led as its CEO and president. The two left Deep earlier this year after deciding to make its technology open source. Before Deep, Hazel was a lead architect at Oracle and Yetton was the leader of LogMeIn's Xively Internet of Things business. Yetton also served in leadership roles at companies that got acquired by VMware, Intel and Microsoft.
"What we saw out there is the world is really moving quickly to the cloud," Yetton said. However, the problem with popular cloud storage services like S3 is that there's no easy way to query, process and discover stored data without spending months and significant resources to build "expensive scaffolding" to support these features, Hazel added.
That's where Hazel found a way forward. "What used to take months of years to build now takes minutes or hours," he said.
By working on his own proprietary software, Hazel developed a way to create an "abstraction layer" over S3 that gives companies a "powerful lens" into their data. Chaos Sumo's capabilities include the ability to search and expose metadata that can be used for analytical purposes, turn and refine S3 buckets into data sets that can be queried; and build virtual data pipelines by coding directly onto S3. The service also has a "design studio" that users perform quick data analyses.
With a growing number of companies looking to find ways to harness the large amounts of data they collect, Hazel and Yetton can be a powerful tool in this era of Big Data. When Chaos Sumo launches into beta next week, they aim to attract 200 users, 10 percent of which they hope will convert into paying customers when the commercial version launches this fall.
