Context Relevant raises $7M for ‘world’s fastest’ predictive analytics engine

Data scientists are a highly coveted and rare in an industry obsessed with data. Context Relevant helps organizations glean insights from data — but without a menagerie of data scientists to back them up.

Today the company announced that it raised $7 million in its first institutional round of funding.

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Context Relevant claims to be “the world’s fastest predictive analytics application.” It connects to multiple data sources, including SQL, web logs, CRM systems, market data, and social media posts and integrates with existing Hadoop deployments. Making sense of this mountain of data is where a data scientist would usually step in. However, Context Relevant has created a series of behavioral analytic solutions with “embedded” data science expertise. These solutions look at trillions of interactions to identify relationships, automatically generate and refine analyses, make forecasts, and provide actionable recommendations in near real time.

There are currently three solutions in the startup’s behavioral analytics library — banking and finance, web context personalization, and online travel. The banking and finance offering examines at statistical relationships within customer transaction histories, CRM data, and data feeds, and compares this with the current financial market to find promising opportunities. Using the web content tool, organizations can determine each visitor’s preferences and recommend content accordingly. The online travel solution helps companies present choices that are tailored to each potential customer based on their online activity and external data about travel trends, hotel rooms, ratings, and so on.

Data is proliferating at astonishing rates, and there is high-demand for any product or service that helps organizations makes sense of it in an accurate, affordable, and scaleable way. Research firm McKinsey found that the United States faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of “big data.” However, advancements in big data and machine learning have made it possible for businesses to ramp up their marketing and engagement efforts using technology. Companies that provide software along these lines have attracted massive amounts of venture capital over the past few years and it is a competitive space.

Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Geoff Entress and others participated in this round. Context Relevant is based in Seattle and has raised $9.8 million to date.