Ayasdi Founders Gurjeet Singh Gunnar Carlsson Harlan Sexton

Machine Intelligence startup Ayasdi, Inc. has raised $55 million Series C in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers that included existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, FLOODGATE, Citi Ventures, and new investors, Centerview Capital Technology and Draper Nexus.

Ayasdi offers Machine Intelligence software that is said to solve “the most complex and impactful analytical challenges for Fortune 500 companies around the globe.”

Originally developed at the request of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the company’s Topological Data Analysis (TDA) machine learning software applies the mathematical principles of shape to identify meaningful patterns and values within complex datasets.

“By combining many machine learning algorithms together with topological mathematics and artificial intelligence, Ayasdi developed an entirely new approach that simplifies complex data analysis for large organizations,” General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Ted Schlein said in a statement. “Machine Intelligence is one of the breakthrough innovations that will drive the next information and productivity wave in the coming decade.”

Ayasdi says that it saw a 400% growth in bookings for the fiscal year ending January 30th, and that its current client list includes Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, Mercy Health System, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, UCSF Medical Center, among others, and it has partnerships with Cloudera, Inc., Hortonworks, Inc., Intel Corp., and Teradata Corp.

A different approach

One aspect that sets Ayasdi’s approach apart from Big Data companies in 2015 is that the firm focuses on giving business executives the same abilities as data scientists. Its platform is able to discover relevant queries for extremely complex data sets automatically and quickly, setting its Insight Discovery apart.

In the financial world, customers use Ayasdi to enhance their consumer credit decisions, accelerate the development and accuracy of risk and regulatory models, optimize services for private banking clients and improve fraud detection models. In healthcare, service providers use Ayasdi services to analyze extensive clinical records to identify best practices that will improve both patient and financial outcomes by analyzing a broad range of data types to find important patterns that reduce costs while delivering a higher quality of care.

Founded in 2008, Ayasdi has raised $106.3 million to-date, including the new round.