PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Maana, a pioneer in search engine technology for big-data-fueled solutions, came out of stealth today with its new search and discovery platform. In use at some of the world’s largest corporations, Maana drives significant improvements in productivity, efficiency, safety, and security in the operations of core enterprise assets. The company is funded by Chevron Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures, Frost Data Capital, GE Ventures, and Intel Capital.
“The nature of search in the enterprise is changing. The driver behind this change is the need to have preventive and predictive capabilities in operating core enterprise assets,” said Babur Ozden, founder and chief executive officer at Maana. “Such capabilities require connecting technical datasets from a large number of data sources to thousands of employees involved in operations and maintenance of these assets. Increasingly, corporations consider search as the easiest way to implement this connection that is also scalable. Search has proven to be a powerful self-service analytics platform for data from web pages and documents, and now Maana expands it to data from core enterprise assets.”
Maana recently closed an over-subscribed Series A financing round of $11 million. The new funding brings the company’s total investment to more than $14 million. The company will use the new funds to expand its capacity to meet the demand from Fortune 500 corporations.
“As the sheer volume of data grows within enterprise data lakes based on Hadoop, finding hidden but important relationships in data requires new approaches like those being pioneered by Maana,” said Jason Waxman, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel. “Intel continues to invest in big data analytics innovations that help make Intel’s data center technologies the preferred platform for companies turning data into actionable intelligence.”
Brett May, Head of Venture Capital and M&A at GE Software, said: “The Industrial Internet is the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs and developers to drive rapid innovation and industry transformation. Between the connectivity brought by the Industrial Internet and creation of industrial time series data that needs to be analyzed, Maana’s technology has the potential to solve the problem of ‘big data search’ particularly for industrial data, which is very different from consumer data.”
Maana is an industry-agnostic platform that is deployed between existing line-of-business applications and the multiple sources of data from the operations of core enterprise assets. Once it is deployed, the Maana search engine crawls, mines, analyzes, joins, classifies, clusters, connects, and correlates to create a new knowledge structure of an asset. This knowledge structure is made of the Emergent Semantic Graph™ and the Liquid Index™. Using this knowledge structure, Maana adds discovery, personalization, recommendation, and decision support capabilities to the existing line-of-business applications through search. Running behind these line-of-business applications, Maana improves the day-to-day decisions of thousands of employees involved in the operations, maintenance, and management of core enterprise assets.
“Data mining is ultimately about solving business problems, and Maana’s search-based platform supports all aspects of the process,” said Donald Thompson, founder and chief technology officer at Maana. “Maana helps integrate data from disparate sources and turn it into meaningful knowledge that can be interactively explored and operationalized into line-of-business solutions. Search with Maana is about far more than today’s hits-in-documents approach; it is a powerful yet familiar tool to get the information you need to support decisions and drive improvements in your business.”
Maana technology is not based on Solr / Lucene. Maana currently focuses on the Fortune 500 market and has a highly successful track record on data from operations of core enterprise assets in numerous industries such as Oil and Gas, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Insurance.
About Chevron Technology Ventures
Chevron Technology Ventures pursues business solutions and technologies with the potential to improve Chevron’s base business operations by finding, sponsoring and demonstrating emerging technologies, and championing their integration into Chevron to improve business value. The Venture Capital Team invests in companies at any phase in the development cycle – from providing early-stage seed investment to offering capital for full-scale commercialization – and helps transfer the technology into the business.
About ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures
ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures invests in great business ideas. Through Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips invests in innovative companies and provides them with capital to develop their technologies. Some of these technologies have the potential to improve the company’s exploration and production performance. Others offer the opportunity to adopt early breakthrough emerging technologies.
About Frost Data Capital
Frost Data Capital is a combined incubator and venture capital firm with a unique approach designed specifically to capture some of the enormous value that will be created as the “Big Data” revolution unfolds. Based out of Southern California, Frost Data Capital has built an ecosystem of innovative start-ups with deep expertise in big data, entrepreneurialism, advanced technology, analytics, and the Industrial Internet. www.frostdatacapital.com
About GE Ventures
GE Ventures is committed to identifying, scaling and accelerating ideas that will make the world work better. Focused on the areas of software and analytics, advanced manufacturing, energy and healthcare, GE Ventures helps entrepreneurs and start-ups succeed by providing access to GE’s technical expertise, capital, and opportunities for commercialization through GE’s global network of business, customers, and partners. GE Ventures is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. For more information, please visit www.geventures.com.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, consumer Internet, digital media and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$11.4 billion in over 1,400 companies in 57 countries. In that timeframe, 211 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world, and 366 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2014, Intel Capital invested $359 million in 125 investments, including 59 new deals. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.
About Maana
Maana is pioneering new search technology for big data. It helps corporations drive significant improvements in productivity, efficiency, safety, and security in the operations of their core assets. Investors include: Chevron Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips Technology Ventures, Frost Data Capital, GE Ventures, and Intel Capital. Maana is privately held with offices in Palo Alto, California and Bellevue, Washington. Visit us at www.maana.io.
