Portland data startup thatDot unveiled an open-source tool called Quine that company founders hope will usher in a new set of data infrastructure.
The company is following the established open-source business model found in software, where the heart of the technology is available for free but can be a paid enterprise tool for some customers.
With Quine, developers get a “streaming graph” and can take huge amounts of data and interpret meaning based on any number of event triggers, said founder and CEO Ryan Wright.
Current state of the art for business intelligence has two glaring issues, he said. One, it doesn’t allow for real-time understanding but instead takes time between when an event is triggered and when intelligence tools can interpret it. And two, it takes large teams of software engineers longer to build the data pipeline and processing needed to interpret high-volume data streams.
“Quine can transform months of tedious data engineering into an afternoon’s work enabling data pipeline engineers to easily interpret high-volume event data streams, innovate and ship products faster, and to use the emerging Graph AI tools driving the next wave in machine learning,” Wright said.
The technology behind Quine and thatDot has been in development for more than seven years. It started with Wright and his work at computer science research firm Galois. There Wright worked on transparent computing research through contracts with the federal Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. That work used cybersecurity as a use case to identify and track anomalies through a network.
ThatDot came out of stealth development two years ago.
“We have community of users now,” said Wright, noting that more than a dozen teams from companies across industries, large and small are using Quine. He added that these users are already building “recipes” or pre-built uses for Quine that others can easily plug in.
For instance, someone doing blockchain analysis looking for money laundering could use the pre-built blockchain recipe to tag an account and propagate all the connections on where currency moves through the network. There are built in visualizations and real-time notifications.
“Our applicability is horizontal. From cybersecurity, to blockchain analysis to big banks, our technology is generally applicable,” he said.
The company has been funded through DARPA research as well as a $2.1 million seed round it raised in 2020. Wright expects to raise a Series A later this year, he said.
The team has grown to about a dozen people with most in Portland. However, Wright said the company is remote-first and will hire people outside the area as needed. Wright and Chief Operating Officer Rob Malnati both have history working with big names in Portland tech.
In addition to Galois, Wright had engineering leadership positions at Janrain and Airship. Malnati was on the leadership team at Cedexis and then Citrix. Recently the company added Tony Falco to the leadership team as head of developer and customer success. Falco was co-founder of mobile AR development platform Torch and co-founder of database startup Orchestrate, which was acquired by Centurylink.
