On the Radar: Promethium, StreamNative, Inzata

(Oleksii Lishchyshyn/Shutterstock)

Welcome to On the Radar, a new Datanami feature about interesting new startups in the big data and analytics space. In this week’s edition, we explore three vendors making news, including Promethium, NativeStreams, and Inzata.

Promethium, a provider of AI-powered data management software that’s based in Menlo Park, California, has landed on our radar with a $6 million round of funding led by .406 Ventures. The round, which the company tells us is a pre-Series A round, comes on the heels of a $2.5 million seed round when the company was founded two years ago.

The company’s main offering, dubbed the Data Navigation System (DNS), is designed to accelerate the entire data analysis process. According to Promethium, all that a user has to do is dictate their query, and the software does the rest.  That includes using natural language processing (NLP) to “understand” the query, automatically convert the query into SQL, locate the source that contains the necessary data, execute the query, and return the results.

This process, which relies on metadata be exchanged behind the scene to learn about which data sources are available, can potentially speed the delivery of queries by up to 100x, the company claims. DNS, which was launched in October, runs in the cloud and on-prem, and works across relational databases, data warehouses, and HDFS. The company is named after the extremely rare and radioactive element that has an atomic weight of 61, hence its website, pm61data.com.

Companies that are looking to invest in real-time streaming data solutions have a lot of options available to them, most notably Apache Kafka. But Kafka isn’t the only game in town, and an alternative that users may want to consider adding to their radar is StreamNative.

The San Francisco, California-based company was founded in January 2019 by two of the engineers behind Apache Bookkeeper and Apache Pulsar, the distributed pub-sub messaging system that was originally developed at Yahoo. Sijie Guo, who is StreamNative’s CEO and co-founder, was previously the lead technical lead for the messaging group at Twitter, and currently is the vice president for Apache BookKeeper and a PMC member of Apache Pulsar. His co-founder, Jia Zhai, is a core engineer for StreamNative and a PMC member for both projects.

StreamNative’s focus is to build a larger community for Pulsar and BookKeeper and helping enterprise adopt them for managing and analyzing event streams. “Our mission is to help the companies over the world make values and innovations out of their enterprise data as real-time event streams,” it says on its website.

Also on our radar is a Tampa, Florida company called Inzata. Founded in 2015, this firm develops an AI-powered data exploration and modeling tool that helps users make sense of raw data.

Inzata supports 200+ data connectors that let users bring data into the data modeling environment. Once there, a series of AI assistants guide users through the process of discovering relationships and patterns hidden in the data. Inzata also offers a series of pre-built “enrichments” that let users quickly add context to the data, such as customer demographics or historical weather data. The company has dozens of enrichments, with more on the way.

Finally, Inzata offers an interactive visualization interface that allows users to really get into the data. The dashboard tool, which supports D3.js widgets, rivals what much bigger firms like Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft (PowerBI) can offer, some customers say.

Got a hot tip for a company that should be on our radar? Then contact us and let us know!

Related Item:

On the Radar: Cortex Labs, RadicalBit, Qeexo

Editor’s note: This story was corrected. Promethium’s $6 million round was a pre-Series A round, not a Series A round. Datanami regrets the error.