Big-Data Investing Gets Its Own Supergroup - NYTimes.com

Big Data is getting a council of wise men. With money.

The Data Collective is a fund specializing in investments in companies doing everything from creating large, complex databases and faster processing of information from diverse sources, to applications that make use of novel and interesting patterns that might be exploited. The initial fund is small, but the outfit clearly has some very large ambitions.

?We?re at the start of a multibillion-dollar economic shift based on cheap bandwidth, storage and computing, and an explosion of data,? said Zachary Bogue, one of four partners organizing the fund. ?Everything has become substantially cheaper for a start-up, and there are lots of areas to disrupt.?

There is a lot of that kind of talk going on now, since our increasingly connected world has created sensors everywhere and lots of cheap computing in the cloud. What sets the Data Collective apart is that it already includes 35 equity partners who have a lot of experience in the field.

Early investors in the first fund, some $6 million, include Gil Elbaz, whose Applied Semantics became a critical part of Google AdWords, and who now runs a large data marketplace called Factual; Todd Papaioannou, the former chief cloud architect at Yahoo, whose new company, Continuuity, is working on a way to build software applications using lots of data; and Abdur Chowdhury, the former chief scientist at Twitter, who recently formed a company called Pushd to look at ways to gain insights from mobile phone data.

?People like this can help with deals, development and exits,? Mr. Bogue said. ?They know the technology, and they can make recruiting calls to lots of people. They know a lot of interesting things that are going on, and like to see what new stuff is going on.?

A second fund, about $50 million, is currently being raised, according to several people familiar with its operations who asked not to be identified. Mr. Bogue said he could not comment on any continued fund-raising.

Mr. Bogue is already known as an early investor in the payments company Square and as a co-founder of the Founder?s Den, an office space in San Francisco that houses a number of start-ups. Other partners managing the fund include Matt Ocko, a veteran of Softbank who was also a seed investor in Zynga; Mike Driscoll, a founder of Metamarkets, which offers cloud-based data analysis; and Bradford Cross, who founded a company called Prismatic, which looks at an individual?s media consumption to build a customized news feed.

The fund has already made 46 investments, Mr. Bogue said, in companies including Kaggle, a kind of crowdsourced statistical analysis service; keen.io, whose products let mobile application developers collect and analyze data, and Citus Data, whose cloud-based database is claimed to be several times faster than Oracle?s most advanced offering.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/big-data-investing-gets-its-own-supergroup/

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