Harvard-based Big Data and analytics consulting marketplace Experfy, Inc. has raised a seed round of $1.5 million.

Investors included XPRIZE Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, Harvard Business School Professor Tarun Khanna; Intrado President George Heinrichs; Former Chief Innovation Officer of the Agency for International Development Maura O’Neill; Former president of Singularity University Neil Jacobstein; Thomson Reuters Global Head of Trading Compliance Miftah Khan; and Smart Launch Cofounder Rawy Iskander.

Founded in 2014, Experfy offers a marketplace for data scientists that is similar in fashion to what is offered by companies such as Upwork Global, Inc. (formerly oDesk,) and Freelancer Technology Pty. Ltd. for more generic skills.

The company has as its primary goal to assemble the world’s most prestigious data and analytics talent, available to work on-demand, “that not only possesses algorithmic skills but also deep domain knowledge.”

Experfy says it wants to help enterprises hire the world’s best analytics talent to increase the speed of decision-making, manage risk and understand customer needs  while fundamentally disrupting how big data consulting is done today.

“We empower both clients and data experts by bringing them on a common platform, which minimizes administrative overhead and ensures full confidentiality…Experfy is here to usher a new era in which high-end consulting can take place in the cloud, on-demand.”

Founders Sarabjot Kaur and Harpreet Singh told The Wall Street Journal that they are initially targeting small and midsize businesses that have yet to harness value from data they have stored but not analyzed.

Kaur noted that she has seen a number of companies in manufacturing, agriculture and other sectors that are doing between $50 million and $100 million in revenue, but have no dashboard and are still manually inputting many items.

“They think big data is not for them. They think it’s brain surgery,” she said. “It’s not.”

Disrupt indeed

While this sort of on demand, freelancing style marketplace has been done in other sectors before, Big Data and analytics has traditionally either been done in-house, or has been outsourced to big firms that specialize in the field.

What’s on the table here is a solution that potentially cuts costs by allowing companies to connect directly with data scientists for work, be that one off jobs, or more, without the overheads of employing that person full time, or paying big bills to Big Data specialist companies.

That disruptive nature of providing a more affordable, on-demand alternative does rely on the market expanding, but as the importance of data mining and analytics become more of a need down the long tail from the Fortune 500, demand will increase, and Experfy, particularly with its impressive list of backers, looks well placed in catching a good portion of that growth wave.