Minetta Brook, a big data startup led by Deepak “DB” Bharadwaj and Prabhu Venkatesh, has raised $2 million in seed funding to continue work on its first product for the financial services sector.
“We have built the world’s first automated real-time discovery engine for fast extraction of relevant streaming information and indirectly referenced content,” said Bharadwaj, who previously worked at Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. He added that the product synthesizes dynamic unstructured data such as news and structured data such as financial tickers and stock symbols.
“Unlike sentiment driven or statistical methods that count clicks to assess document level popularity, our engine absorbs the content itself, along with their grammatical and semantic structures,” he said. “This is faster as well as more accurate in terms of match and relevance compared to other approaches.”
The technology has applications across multiple industries, but Minetta Brook is starting out in the financial services arena. It plans to sell the service initially to financial traders and research analysts, with the first product entering a beta period in the coming weeks.
The funding was provided by TiE Angel Group Seattle (TAGS) and Naya Ventures.
“We are very excited to work with Minetta Brook’s experienced team of experts who are bringing a new dimension to the structured and unstructured data world,” said Haresh Ved, Chair of the TiE Angels Group Seattle program. “We believe that their platform and proprietary (natural language processing) and machine learning technologies will revolutionize big data processing.”
The funding in Minetta Brook follows an investment earlier this month in Seattle big data startup Context Relevant, which is also targeting its services at the financial services sector. It raised $7 million from Madrona, Bloomberg and others.
