10 Hot Tech Startups For May

Big Data Startups Dominate The May 2013 Class Of Emerging Vendors

Startups developing technologies for working with big data continue to dominate our monthly roundup of emerging vendors. EdgeSpring, Sqrrl, Versium, Visier, WibiData and Zoomdata all bring their unique expertise to bear to address some aspect of the big data challenge.

Virtualization remains hot, as demonstrated by Anuta Networks with its network virtualization technology. And, advances in voice recognition, unified communications and application management round out this month's crop of emerging vendors.

Anuta Lines Up Distributor For Its Network Virtualization Product

Anuta Networks develops its nCloudX network services virtualization product technology the company said simplifies and automates the complete lifecycle of network services in complex, heterogeneous networks with physical and virtual IT infrastructure in private and public cloud deployments.

This month, Anuta signed a deal with Networld Corp., a leading Japanese distributor, under which Networld will include nCloudX as part of its product and services portfolio for sale through the distributor's VAR network. Milpitas, Calif.-based Anuta was founded in 2010 by CEO Chandu Guntakala.

Beyond Verbal Wants To Know How You're Feeling

Beyond Verbal is developing voice recognition software that can not only understand words but also pick up on the emotional nuances of a person's voice to determine how he or she is feeling. The company envisions its patented "emotion detection" technology finding its way into a broad range of applications including customer services, games, dating services and personal assistants such as Apple's Siri.

Launched this month, Tel Aviv, Israel-based Beyond Verbal just raised $2.8 million in financing from Genesis Angels, a new venture capital firm. Yuval Mor is the company's CEO.

Boundary Warns Of Possible Application And Cloud Disasters

Boundary developed what it calls a "central intelligence service" for IT operations managers, analyzing real-time data about application traffic "chatter" to provide early warnings about potential cloud and application problems. The startup's technology combines the collected data with information generated by other application performance management tools, such as those from Splunk and AppDynamics, to help prevent disasters before they occur.

San Francisco-based Boundary launched in May 2012 and has raised $19 million in venture capital. The company CEO is Gary Read, who previously started Nimsoft, a developer of IT monitoring and service desk applications, and sold it to CA Technologies in 2010 for $350 million.

EdgeSpring Offers Business Analytics Platform For Information Workers

EdgeSpring came out of stealth mode this month and unveiled its platform for building business intelligence applications with interactive data analysis and visualization capabilities. The platform, according to the company, works with structured and unstructured data and cuts the amount of time needed to develop analytical applications from weeks to hours.

EdgeSpring's pitch is that everyday information workers can use its business analytics system without having to rely on IT specialists and data analysts.

Founded in 2010, San Mateo, Calif.-based EdgeSpring recently raised $11 million in first-round financing from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. Vijay Chakravarthy is the company's founder and CEO.

Sqrrl Goes Big With High-Performance Analytics, Data Storage

Sqrrl develops Sqrrl Enterprise, a big data analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and Apache Accumulo -- the latter an open-source, high-performance data storage and retrieval system developed on Hadoop and based on Google's "BigTable" design.

Sqrrl, based in Cambridge, Mass., calls its system "the most secure and most scalable big data platform that powers big data applications." According to Sqrrl's Wikipedia entry, most of the company's founding staff worked at the ultra-secret National Security Agency.

Sqrrl raised $2 million in seed funding in August 2012. In March, the company named Mark Terenzoni, former F5 Networks senior vice president of global manufacturing, as CEO.

Versium Helps Businesses Get Really Close To Their Customers

Versium has developed what it calls a "LifeData" platform that collects publicly available online and offline data about consumers and combines it with information a business may already have, such as a customer's spending history, to create a detailed profile of that customer.

The system can collect and cross-analyze demographic, psycho-graphic and social-graphic information -- everything from purchase interests to education levels to financial and credit ratings. The company licenses the data to other businesses, or processes the huge volumes of data with its own analytical applications and provides clients with the results.

Founded in early 2012 and launched in March, Seattle-based Versium was started by CEO Chris Matty (pictured) and CTO Kevin Marcus, both former InfoSpace executives.

VDO360 Snags Top Startup Award At Interop

VDO360, a developer of unified communications hardware, was in the spotlight at the Interop show earlier this month when show judges gave the company the Best New Start-Up Award.

Founded in 2012, VDO360 offers a variety of UC equipment, ranging from webcams to microphones. But, its claim to fame is perhaps its VDO Cart, which bundles together a 12-time optical zoom PTZ camera, a professional grade microphone, LED monitors, and Intel i7-based computer for top-notch graphics, video and Blu-ray presentations.

Visier's Workforce Analytics Apps Bring Strategic Planning To HR

Visier develops workforce analytics and planning applications, software the company said business and human resource managers use to better gauge their workforce needs. Visier's cloud-based software, with its predictive capabilities, helps organizations attract and retain employees, improve productivity and reduce workforce-related costs.

This week Visier raised $15 million in Series B financing with participation by investors Summit Partners and Foundation Capital. Headquartered in San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia, Visier was founded in 2010. Its CEO and co-founder is one-time Business Objects CEO John Schwarz.

WibiData Captures $15 Million In Venture Funding

Wibidata develops big data applications that help businesses collect and analyze huge volumes of data in real time. Built on the Kiji project open-source framework, Wibidata's software manages and analyzes huge volumes of data about user behavior, including profile data and log-oriented transactional data, consolidated in one location.

This month San Francisco-based Wibidata raised $15 million in venture financing, providing funding the company will use to accelerate its product engineering and development work and ramp up sales and marketing efforts.

The second-round funding was led by Canaan Partners, a new investor, which was joined by New Enterprise Associates and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who participated in the company's Series A funding. The CEO is Christophe Bisciglia who co-founded Cloudera.

Zoomdata Offers Advanced Data Visualization Capabilities

Zoomdata offers what it calls a real-time, big data visualization application. Its software can analyze data from multiple sources, including real-time streams of data, and display the results through continuously updated data visualizations. The software also allows users to easily share the analytical results with others.

Zoomdata's software accomplishes all this by foregoing legacy data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) technology and database stacks by working directly with raw data streams, according to the company.

Founded in November 2012, the Reston, Va.-based company received $1.1 million in seed-round funding. Justin Langseth is the founder and CEO.