Minetta Brook Inc., a Big Data intelligence startup, has come out of stealth mode and announced it has raised $2 million (Rs 11.8 crore) in seed funding from TiE Angel Group Seattle or TAGS, an angel investment group, and Naya Ventures LP, an early-stage venture fund. TAGS led the seed funding round. The company also closed a convertible note round in February this year, which was led by Keiretsu Forum Northwest, an investment community comprising angel investors.
As part of the investment, Gowri Shankar, venture partner at Naya Ventures, will join the board of Minetta.
Founded in 2011, Naya Ventures is a $50 million early-stage investment firm that invests in India and US-focused companies operating in mobile and cloud space. It invests anywhere between $250,000 and $3 million in startups and has already funded companies such as BoxFish, GlobalOutlook, Glympse and Zoomingo. Headquartered in Dallas, the company has its India office in Hyderabad. Naya Ventures was founded by Dayakar Puskoor, executive chairman at Motivity Labs and at GlobalOutlook; Prabhakar Reddy, an active angel investor and board director at GlobalOutlook and Motivity Labs; and Gowri Shankar, former president and CEO at SinglePoint.
Commenting on the investment, Shankar said, “We are focused on investing in early-stage companies that can use our operational expertise and ecosystem knowledge. Minetta Brook’s team developing a Big Data intelligence platform was the perfect fit for us.â€
“The investment allows us to bring to customers our intelligence engine with applications across multiple sectors. Our first application targets the financial sector and will change how news, market and reference data are synthesised to provide hyper-relevant, real-time information to traders and analysts,†said Deepak Bharadwaj, co-founder and CEO of Minetta Brook.
The Seattle-based startup was founded in early 2011 by Bharadwaj and Prabhu Venkatesh (president). Prior to setting up Minetta, Bharadwaj had founded Aelego, a global services firm where he also served as MD and CEO. Earlier, he had served in senior roles at Aqva Group (president) and Microsoft (general manager), and also worked at companies such as Sun Microsystems and Axil. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and an MS degree in Computer Science from University of Oklahoma.
Venkatesh had earlier worked at several companies including Banc of America Securities LLC, GemStone Systems, Bloomberg, Salomon Brothers, Sound Financial Technologies, Telekurs Financial, Convergent Technologies and Fortune Systems, LLC. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and an MS in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Science.
The company’s core technology is its Big Data intelligence platform that enables fast discovery of relevant information from streaming structured and unstructured content. The technology development has taken around two years and the company is now planning to transition from beta to revenue mode. Minetta will be shortly announcing its first product running on its Big Data intelligence engine to rope in paid customers.
(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)
