Syntasa, a rising D.C. area-based startup that specializes in analyzing customer behavioral patterns for marketers, represents a new "species" of data analytics company — combining national defense expertise with big data marketing technology.
Founded in 2012, President/CEO Jay Marwaha leads the company with the expertise he gained as a DoD intelligence contractor with ABSc. Now, only three years later, Syntasa’s client list already includes the likes of Lenovo, Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe, and Cloudera. The company calls itself the industry's first "marketing analytics-as-a-service (MAaaS) platform."
Marwaha, who worked as a New York City-based VP for American Express, quickly left his job to form Herndon, Va.-based cybersecurity firm ABSc after witnessing two hijacked airliners crash into the World Trade Center, which held close colleagues and friends, on 9/11.
"It was then I decided that I wanted to make a difference and saw an opportunity to help our government with their security related issues … Big data and data analytics was only at its infancy at the time. As Internet use started to grow we saw cybersecurity issues become more prevalent. We started to assist the government with their cyber security challenges," Marwaha told DC Inno.
The Approach
The digital marketing and data analytics tech startup offers the "very latest predictive behavioral analytics technology to help enterprises use their large amounts of data and identify actions and outcomes,” said Marwaha, "We do that by providing software that goes through mountains of consumer data gathered by each brand and analyzing click strokes to understand and predict online consumer behavior while they peruse the sites of particular brands."
He added that the company "has taken off as more and more enterprises are moving to open source tools like Hadoop and Apache Spark, which can handle large amounts of data. We’ve brought the expertise once used in the federal government’s efforts to fight national security threats through intelligence gathering online, and unleashed it at the enterprise level."
Today, Marwaha leads Syntasa while ABSc is managed by the legacy management as a separate entity that function entirely independent. Under ABSc, he provided consultant services to a cohort of federal agencies — including the DoD and Intelligence Community — that battle foreign cyberthreats.
ABSc tracks the behavioral patterns of certain cyberattacks, thereby helping to identify specific hackers/actors and the origins of these attacks. The goal is create a better response effort and in some cases to deflect attacks by improving security measures.
“Syntasa is in a unique market position with its predictive behavioral analytics solution … The defense sector teaches you to develop solutions with a certain sense of rigor and discipline,” said Marwaha.
Background
The company, which has been entirely self-funded to date, employs about 42 full time employees, who are mostly based in Herndon, but it plans on expanding. "We are looking to grow exponentially in the next 12 months," Marwaha said.
By 2020, scientists predict that "the amount of data on the planet is set to grow tenfold … from around 4.4 zettabytes," according to ComputerWeekly, and Marwaha believes this trend will greatly benefit customer data analytics companies like his own. "Companies who leverage this type of behavioral data are poised to be leaders of the new economy."
Locally, the D.C. tech scene has certainly witnessed a booming customer-centric data analytics wave in the form of several highly successful companies, including TrackMaven, Clarabridge, Tahzoo, New Brand Analytics (acquired by Sprinklr) and ValityX, among others.
Riding The Wave
Cooley LLP partner Andy Lustig, who focuses on the D.C. tech scene, agrees with Marwaha’s sentiment, telling DC Inno, “I think one of the hottest growth areas in the metro DC tech community is in the data analytics space. We are seeing an influx of capital looking to fund analytic companies, frothy venture capital valuations and exit multiples involving analytic companies and, most importantly, a significant surge in the number of new companies with innovation capabilities that are going to super charge the next generation of data analytic platforms.”
Lustig added, "This innovation is being driven in part by an influx of technology talent (specifically, data scientists, software developers and experts in cloud computing and storage) transitioning out of the intelligence agencies. It is also being driven by a growing movement within the intelligence agencies to allow innovative data analytic capabilities that were previously only authorized for use within the federal government to enter the commercial arena."
When I asked Syntasa's CEO whether he believes we will begin to see other cybersecurity companies and intelligence experts expand and/or pivot into marketing/advertising ventures, he offered an interesting counter response: "The converse is more likely. There is a sense of behavioral analytics taking shape in the cybersecurity market in order to proactively predict where an attack may occur. Which comes first isn’t really the point. The two markets are BOTH now leveraging the power of big data and machine learning to predict events -- whether it is leading to a potential threat or a potential customer."
