Adatao wants to let data scientists work together, so it gets $13M

Adatao, a startup with software for letting business users and data scientists collaborate on the analysis of data sets, has raised $13 million in new funding.

Adatao lets people make interactive visualizations for web pages, but it also provides an interface for working with data using the R and Python languages data scientists know and love, as well as the popular SQL query language. And if you don’t know those, that’s okay. You can use Adatao’s SmartQuery interface that translates regular English words into queries.

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The software came out in December, according to a blog post today from Adatao co-founder and chief executive Christopher Nguyen. Now the startup’s marketing is targeting uses for telcos, financial services companies, insurers, and manufacturers.

Meanwhile, a few other companies have been pushing tools that let data analysts and data scientists collaborate, sometimes invoking the concept of providing a GitHub-like service for those types of people. Mode Analytics has focused most on SQL, while Sense and Domino have decided to chase the languages data scientists use every day, including R, Python, and MATLAB.

These startups could be on the minds of Adatao’s employees and investors, as well as the many venture-backed data visualization startups out there, including DataPad, DataHero, and StatWing.

Andreessen Horowitz led the new funding round in Adatao. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bloomberg Beta also participated. Andreessen’s Peter Levine is joining the board, and Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen will be an Adatao board observer. Here’s Levine writing about Adatao’s value in a blog of his own today:

For example, a business user in the airline industry can ask (in natural language) Adatao’s system to predict future airline delay ratios by quickly exploring 20 years of arrival/departure data (124 million rows of data) to break down past delays by week, month, and cause. In the same way Google Docs allows teams all over the world collaborate, Adatao allows data scientists and business users to collaborate on massive datasets, see the same views and together produce a visual model in just three seconds.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Adatao started in 2012. Earlier in his career, Nguyen was director of engineering for Google Apps at Google.