After three years, Maana is emerging out of stealth mode.
The company last week announced an $11 million funding round to fuel development of its big data search engine platform that is already helping Fortune 100 companies maximize the use of internal information.
Investors in this round, which pushes total funding to $14 million, include Chevron Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures, Frost Data Capital, GE Ventures, and Intel Capital.
Maana has a majority of its 23 employees in Bellevue, where the company opened its first office in July 2013 that’s headed up by co-founder and long-time Microsoft veteran Donald Thompson. The Bellevue location houses Maana’s engineering and product development base, while its Palo Alto office — which opened in March — serves as the company’s official headquarters and sales, marketing and business development hub.
Maana CEO and co-founder Babur Ozden told GeekWire that his startup aims to help large companies in industries like oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance harness the information potential of their internal data with an enterprise-level search engine.
“Maana integrates data from disparate sources across the enterprise and turns it into meaningful knowledge that can be interactively explored and used to improve line-of-business operations,” Ozden explained.
Maana is similar to Qumulo, a Seattle-based startup that also came out of stealth mode this year and helps clients see exactly where and how their data is being stored and used.
Ozden said that Maana differentiates itself with the ability to mine data from different sources, create actionable information from the data, and “operationalize” the information across existing lines of business applications.
“We aspire to be the search engine for big data, helping Fortune 500 companies derive additional economic and operational benefit from their big data in their core assets,” he added.
