Company name: AtScale
Headquarters: San Mateo, California
Funding to date: $9 million in 2 rounds
Former Yahoo-er and serial startup founder Dave Mariani came back in 2015 with a new company, AtScale.
Although AtScale hasn't yet raised a boatload of VC cash, its backers are extremely prominent including Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Cloudera cofounder Amr Awadallah.
AtScale works with a big data tech called Hadoop, which is a popular, low-cost way of storing lots of data.
AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily let's business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel, Tableau Software, Microstrategy, with the data stored in Hadoop.
That is such a hard problem to solve, that as Mariani showed AtScale's tech to people to get their feedback, they all wanted to invest or be involved.