Type Private Founder Stephen Purpura Founded 2012 | Industry Data analytics Area served Worldwide Number of employees 50 | |
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Headquarters Wells Fargo Center, 999 3rd Ave #2100, Seattle, WA 98104, United States Key people Joe Polverari (CEO)
Art Munson
Dustin Hillard | ||
Context Relevant is a big data analytics startup based in Seattle, Washington, US. Founded in 2012 by Stephen Purpura, the company sells on-premises software, cloud services, and professional service solutions to help businesses accelerate analysis and actionable insight.
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As of September 26, 2014, Context Relevant has raised $42 million in total investment.
Product
Context Relevant has developed an analytics system that ingests data, determines what’s important, and creates a problem-specific solution that can be deployed while continually learning. The proprietary high-performance machine learning technology accelerates analytics and actionable insight.
Problem-specific Behavioral Analytics Libraries provide an out-of-the-box experience that reduces the workload on users building complicated models. Deployment options include public or private clouds, traditional servers, and Hadoop clusters. Currently available Behavioral Analytics Libraries include solutions for Online Revenue Optimization, Content Prediction, Data Quality Management and Finance.
Scale-out, in-memory technology allows smart caching for small or huge datasets using more computers to parallelize the efforts, as needed.
Context Relevant's software has been applied to various industries, including finance. The information gathered through the technology helps clients predict activity based on observed trends. It is useful for calculating prices and other risks at high speed. The system can also detect fraud quickly.
Investment history
Context Relevant launched with $1.3 million in seed funding from Madrona Venture Group and Seattle-based angel investor Geoff Entress. Other initial investors included Mike McSherry, Cliff Kushler, and Mark Illing of Swype/Nuance. The startup received an additional $1.5 million in funding from Madrona in November 2012. In July 2013, Context Relevant raised a total of $7 million in a round of series A funding. The round included previous investors such as Madrona Venture Group and Geoff Entress, as well as Vulcan Capital and Bloomberg Beta.
In May, June, and September 2014, Context Relevant raised an additional $35 million in total investment in three chunks from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bloomberg Beta, New York Life, Formation 8, Madrona Venture Group, Work-Bench, and prominent Seattle angel investors.
Partners
Context Relevant has partnered with Good Harbor Security Risk Management, a company founded by Richard A. Clarke, a counterterrorism expert and former cyber-security adviser under the Bush administration. Clarke sits on Context Relevant's advisory board and, through his company, helps Context Relevant to repair security breaches and ensure security compliance, among other services.
Awards and recognition
In May 2014 Context Relevant was named to DataBeat's Innovation Showdown.
In April 2014 Context Relevant was nominated for Pacific Northwest Startup of the Year by GeekWire.
In November 2013 Context Relevant was selected by GeekWire in collaboration with the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) and the Bezos Center for Innovation as one of the Seattle 10. This recognizes the most promising young start-up companies within the Seattle region. Context Relevant, along with the nine other companies, was recognized at the GeekWire Gala on 4 December 2013 where they also unveiled a sketch of their business concept on giant-sized cocktail napkins.