Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You founded it in 2012. We are now in 2014. How much adoption have you had following your methodology and in what segment? Where are you finding the sweet spot of your adoption?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: I’m not at liberty to share the exact customer numbers, but we’re above 20 customers at this point. We have a variety of customers. We basically target five industry segments that we think are right for the types of analysts that we target. The five segments are high tech manufacturing, consumer products, retail, financial services, and public sector.

Dannon is one of our consumer products customers. They were actually the second customer who purchased Paxata about a year and a half ago. At the beginning of this year, they did a significant expansion of their Paxata deployment because they were seeing some interesting value for their use cases they were working on.

On the high tech side, one of our biggest customers is Box.com, which is also a Tableau customer. They have a number of groups in the company who are trying to do ad hoc analytics with Tableau and guess what they suffer from? The data preparation problem. By the way, that is the pattern we are seeing over and over again. The end users now have a very nice solution in something like Tableau. So they are able to visualize and build really interesting dashboards of their data except that the data is wrong. Now they say, “Now I can see that the data is wrong. How am I going to go and fix it?” Box is a great example.

They’re using us for assembling information for their recruiting process. They pull data from a number of different recruiting systems, so they can actually see the funnel of the different candidates. Each of those recruiting systems spells the candidate’s name and the positions a little differently. You can’t just glue that data together easily. You have to go through a process of actually refining that data. They started with a small investment but have now expanded their investment after seeing the value of Paxata.

Sramana Mitra: What stage are you guys at? Because your team has had exits before, is this a company that is self-financed? How are you building the company?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: As I had mentioned, we started in 2012 and grew the team to our initial first 10 employees. At the end of 2012, we raised our Series A Round and were funded by Accel Partners India. The partner from Accel is a gentleman by the name of Dinesh Katiyar.

In 2013, we signed our first customer Pabst Brewing Company. We launched our company at the Strata Conference in October of 2013. We actually had five customers on stage with us who joined us for the launch. We also announced our Series B funding that was led by Accel with Walden Riverwood joining in. We have raised $10 million to date in venture capital financing. We are very proud of the fact that, given the amount we’ve raised, we’ve been able to generate significant revenues with the investment that we had.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata
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