Paxata grabs $8M to help data scientists skip the dirty work

Paxata wants to help data scientists avoid getting bogged down in prep work and move right to analysis.

The startup, which provides its offering as a cloud service, sees itself as the missing link between data management systems like Hadoop and analytics applications. It promises to remove most of the painful, manual steps associated with data preparation, minimizing spreadsheets and general chaos.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup emerged from stealth mode today and announced an $8 million funding round led by Accel Partners.

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Above: Prakash Nanduri

“Most business teams face challenges in deriving value from the ever-increasing and varied sources of information,” said Prakash Nanduri, cofounder and CEO of Paxata, in a statement. “They require a fundamentally different way to make all of that data ready for visualization and decisions … in minutes, not months.”

Paxata shares some similarities with ClearStory, which can also pull data from disparate sources, but Paxata will go a step further, merging multiple data sources into a single dataset that can be easily understood by business analytics and visualization tools.

Founded in Jan. 2012, the company has already nabbed customers like Dannon, Box, UBS, and Pabst Brewing Company, as well as partnerships with business intelligence companies Tableau, Cloudera, and Qlikview. Paxata currently has 28 employees.