Attivio nabs $34M to bring all your unstructured data into one place

Attivio, a Boston-based “big data” startup has pulled in $34 million to help customers make sense of their data — whether it’s sitting pretty in a database or is strewn haphazardly around the enterprise.

This first round of funding is led by Oak Investment Partners, a private equity firm with $8.4 billion in capital under management.

“Attivio is the only company answering both the ‘what’ and ‘why’ big data and analytics questions that swirl unanswered in board rooms, war rooms, data centers, support centers and cubicles around the world,” said Ifty Ahmed, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, in a statement. Ahmed will join the company’s board.

Companies are aware that all their potentially valuable semi-structured and unstructured data — texts, emails, Word documents, reports — is scattered. Attivio wants to integrate all that data that is siloed so companies can run queries on it.

As is often the case with enterprise startups, its early customers are primarily government agencies and financial services firms.

Above: Ali Riaz, CEO of Attivio

According to Ali Riaz, the company’s chief executive, (pictured left) “We will utilize the funding to expand our sales and marketing efforts and, in particular, more deeply penetrate core vertical segments.”

With its boost of funding, the company will also be hiring in all areas of its operations from engineering to marketing and sales. It currently has offices in Massachusetts, Israel, Germany, and the UK.

The company was founded in 2007 by Riaz, the former president of FAST Search & Transfer, an enterprise search company that was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2008. Competitors include FAST, as well as search vendors Endeca, Autonomy and Lucid Imagination, that provide the tools for IT teams to search and analyze valuable “dark data” that is hidden within the enterprise.

Existing investors, Per-Olof Söderberg and Tenth Avenue Holdings, also participated in the round.