Paxata is a privately owned software company headquartered in

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose, California, San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 accor ...

. It develops self-service data preparation software that gets data ready for

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sci ...

software. Paxata's software is intended for

business analyst A business analyst (BA) is a person who processes, interprets and documents business processes, products, services and software through analysis of data. The role of a business analyst is to ensure business efficiency increases through their kno ...

s, as opposed to technical staff. It is used to combine data from different sources, then check it for

data quality Data quality refers to the state of qualitative or quantitative pieces of information. There are many definitions of data quality, but data is generally considered high quality if it is "fit for tsintended uses in operations, decision making and ...

issues, such as duplicates and outliers. Algorithms and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

automate certain aspects of data preparation and users work with the software through a user-interface similar to Excel spreadsheets. The company was founded in January 2012 and operated in

stealth mode In business, stealth mode is a company's temporary state of secretiveness, either in total stealth mode when everything about the company is kept secret, or in-company stealth mode which is usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pen ...

until October 2013. It received more than $10 million in venture funding before being acquired by DataRobot.

History

Paxata was founded in January 2012. It initially raised $2 million in venture capital. The company came out of

in October 2013. Simultaneously with its public release, Paxata announced an $8 million funding round led by Accel Partners. Adoption of the software grew quickly. In March 2014,

In-Q-Tel In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the lates ...

acquired an interest in the startup. It raised an additional $18 million in funding in September 2015. It also began working with Cisco to jointly develop the Cisco Data Preparation suite of software and services.

Software

Paxata refers to its suite of cloud-based data

quality Quality may refer to: Concepts *Quality (business), the ''non-inferiority'' or ''superiority'' of something *Quality (philosophy), an attribute or a property *Quality (physics), in response theory *Energy quality, used in various science discipli ...

integration Integration may refer to: Biology *Multisensory integration *Path integration * Pre-integration complex, viral genetic material used to insert a viral genome into a host genome *DNA integration, by means of site-specific recombinase technology, ...

, enrichment and governance products as "Adaptive Data Preparation." The software is intended for

s, who need to combine data from a variety of sources, then check the data for duplicates, empty fields, outliers, trends and integrity issues before conducting analysis or visualization in a third-party software tool. It uses algorithms and machine-learning to automate certain aspects of data preparation. For example, it may automatically detect records belonging to the same person or address, even if the information is formatted differently in each record in different data sets. The software has a spreadsheet-based user interface. Patterns and anomalies in the data are color-coded in the spreadsheet. Then users are provided with instructions on how to resolve data quality issues or to supplement the data with contextual information. Data sets and related quality issues can also be addressed in a collaborative environment through the "Paxata Share" feature. It runs on

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californ ...

. According to analyst firm

Ovum The egg cell or ovum (: ova) is the female reproductive cell, or gamete, in most anisogamous organisms (organisms that reproduce sexually with a larger, female gamete and a smaller, male one). The term is used when the female gamete is not capa ...

, the software is made possible through advances in

predictive analytics Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of Statistics, statistical techniques from data mining, Predictive modelling, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or other ...

and the

NoSQL NoSQL (originally meaning "Not only SQL" or "non-relational") refers to a type of database design that stores and retrieves data differently from the traditional table-based structure of relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which ...

data caching methodology. The software uses

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

algorithms to understand the meaning of a data table's columns and pattern recognition algorithms to find potential duplicates in a data-set. It also uses indexing, text pattern recognition and other technologies traditionally found in social media and search software. One of the software's users is dairy producer

Danone Danone S.A. () is a French multinational corporation, multinational food-products corporation based in Paris. It was founded in 1919 in Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. It is listed on Euronext Paris, where it is a component of the CAC 40 stock mark ...

, which uses the software so that business staff can create their own reports on merchandising, supply chain and product data, without the IT department.

Reception

In its 2014 report "Cool Vendors in Data Integration and Data Quality",

Gartner Gartner, Inc. is an American research and advisory firm focusing on business and technology topics. Gartner provides its products and services through research reports, conferences, and consulting. Its clients include large corporations, gover ...

praised Paxata for developing a "business-user-friendly" data quality product that does not use code. Ventana Research said its spreadsheet-based user interface "should resonate well with business analysts," who are resistant to move away from familiar Excel-like programs. Gartner also said Paxata was recognized in the report due to its automated, algorithm-based features and how it tracks any changes made to the data. Ventana Research said Paxata was in a "noisy marketplace". According to Gartner, while Paxata is an early entrant into the market, many startups and large corporations are making investments in developing similar competing products. According to ''

Gigaom Gigaom is a technology-focused analyst firm and media company. It was founded by Om Malik in San Francisco, California. In March 2015, it was shut down and in June 2015, its website and content were acquired by Knowingly and relaunched. History ...

'' and ''IT Business Edge'', one way Paxata differs is that it automatically merges multiple data-sets into a single table, so it can be easily imported into a visualization or analysis tool. Gartner said Paxata will have a difficult time finding a compelling pricing model, when many data discovery tools that it supplements provide some similar features. In contrast, Ventana said Paxata's pricing was "a pretty small amount" compared to the amount of time users can save.

References

External links

* {{Official website Companies based in Redwood City, California Software companies based in California American companies established in 2012 Privately held companies based in California Defunct software companies of the United States 2012 establishments in California Software companies established in 2012