February 2014 – Beautiful Data

Before and After Series C funding – a network analysis of Domo

One of the most interesting Big Data companies in this network analysis of Venture Capital connections has in my opinion been Domo. Not only did it receive clearly above average funding for such a young company, but it was also one of the nodes with the best connections through Venture Capital firms and their investments. It had one of the highest values for Betweenness Centrality, which means it connects a lot of the other nodes in the Big Data landscape.

Then, some days after I did the analysis and visualization, news broke that Domo received $125M from Greylock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce among others. This is a great opportunity to see what this new financing round means in terms of network structure. Here’s Domo before the round:

And this is Domo $125M later. Notice how its huge Betweenness Centrality almost dwarfs the other nodes in the network. And through its new connections it is strongly connected to MongoDB:

Here’s a look at the numbers, before Series C:

	Company	Centrality
1	Domo	0.1459
2	Cloudera	0.0890
3	MemSQL	0.0738
4	The Climate Corporation	0.0734
5	Identified	0.0696
6	MongoDB, Inc.	0.0673
7	Greenplum Software	0.0541
8	CrowdFlower	0.0501
9	DataStax	0.0489
10	Fusion-io	0.0488

And now:

	Company	Centrality
1	Domo	0.1655
2	MemSQL	0.0976
3	Cloudera	0.0797
4	MongoDB, Inc.	0.0722
5	Identified	0.0706
6	The Climate Corporation	0.0673
7	Greenplum Software	0.0535
8	CrowdFlower	0.0506
9	DataStax	0.0459
10	Fusion-io	0.0442

The new funding round now only increases Domo’s centrality but also MongoDB’s because of the shared investors Salesforce, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity Investments.

Big Data VC investments

As the data-base for the Big Data Investment Map 2014 also includes the dates for most of the funding rounds, it’s not hard to create a time-series plot from this data. This should answer the question whether Big Data is already over the peak (cf. Gartner seeing Big Data reaching the “trough of disillusionment”) or if we still are to experience unseen heights? The answer should be quite clear:

BigDataVC_02022014

The growth does look quite exponential to me. BTW: The early spike in 2007 has been the huge investment in VMWare by Intel and Cisco. Currently, I have not included IPOs and acquisitions in my calculations.

Big Data Investment Map 2014

Here’s an updated version of our Big Data Investment Map. I’ve collected information about ca. 50 of the most important Big Data startups via the Crunchbase API. The funding rounds were used to create a weighted directed network with investments being the edges between the nodes (investors and/or startups). If there were multiple companies or persons participating in a funding round, I split the sum between all investors.

This is an excerpt from the resulting network map – made with Gephi. Click to view or download the full graphic:

If you feel, your company is missing in the network map, please tell us in the comments.

The size of the nodes is relative to the logarithmic total result of all their funding rounds. There’s also an alternative view focused on the funding companies – here, the node size is relative to their Big Data investments. Here’s the list of the top Big Data companies:

Company	Funding (M$, Source: Crunchbase API)
VMware	369
Palantir Technologies	343
MongoDB, Inc.	231
DataStax	167
Cloudera	141
Domo	123
Fusion-io	112
The Climate Corporation	109
Pivotal	105
Talend	102

And here’s the top investing companies:

Company	Big Data funding (M$, Source: Crunchbase API)
Founders Fund	286
Intel	219
Cisco	153
New Enterprise Associates	145
Sequoia Capital	109
General Electric	105
Accel Partners	86
Lightspeed Venture Partners	72
Greylock Partners	63
Meritech Capital Partners	62

We can also use network analytical measures to find out about which investment company is best connected to the Big Data start-up ecosystem. I’ve calculated the Betweenness Centrality measure which captures how good nodes are at connecting all the other nodes. So here are the best connected Big Data investors and their investments starting with New Enterprise Associates, Andreessen Horowitz and In-Q-Tel (the venture capital firm for the CIA and the US intelligence community).

	Investor	Centrality	Big Data Companies
1	New Enterprise Associates	0.0863	GraphLab, MapR Technologies, Fusion-io, MongoDB, Inc., WibiData, Pentaho, CloudFlare, The Climate Corporation, MemSQL
2	Andreessen Horowitz	0.0776	ClearStory Data, Domo, Fusion-io, Databricks, GoodData, Continuuity, Platfora
3	In-Q-Tel	0.0769	Cloudera, Recorded Future, Cloudant, MongoDB, Inc., Platfora, Palantir Technologies
4	Founders Fund	0.0623	Declara, CrowdFlower, The Climate Corporation, Palantir Technologies, Domo
5	SV Angel	0.0602	Cloudera, Domo, WibiData, Citus Data, The Climate Corporation, MemSQL
6	Khosla Ventures	0.0540	ParStream, Metamarkets, MemSQL, ClearStory Data, The Climate Corporation
7	IA Ventures	0.0510	Metamarkets, Recorded Future, DataSift, MemSQL
8	Data Collective	0.0483	Trifacta, ParStream, Continuuity, Declara, Citus Data, Platfora, MemSQL
9	Hummer Winblad Venture Partners	0.0458	NuoDB, Karmasphere, Domo
10	Battery Ventures	0.0437	Kontagent, SiSense, Continuuity, Platfora