Guavus

The company

The company was founded in 2006 by CEO Anukool Lakhina, who developed the idea for the company in the mid-1990s during his PhD project. Lakhina, working for Sprint Applied Research & Advanced Technology Labs at the time, where he noticed they were filling up their data storage capacity at a rate that caused much of the data to become obsolete for timely analysis. The company, headquartered in San Mateo, California, employs 500 employees and has offices in Mexico, Montreal, Singapore, and the UK. They also have an R&D base in India. Its software correlates and fuses data as it streams from networks with data that sits in operational databases to create real time analytics. "Guavus works with three of the four largest mobile operators in the U.S. ... and four of the top five Internet backbone operators," according to the Wall Street Journal. The company is also pilot testing services in helping to run transportation, utilities, and manufacturing logistics for clients.

The company uses solution-oriented approaches to applying its large data sets, finding connections within smaller data sets in order to produce needed information. It follows an "analyze first, store later" model according to Derrick Harris of GigaOM, analyzing the data as it first flows in off a network instead of after it has been stored. The data is also contextualized with demographics and other information about a client's consumer base. Lakhina has described the process of analyzing data through Guavus as progressing through several stages. In 2014 the company's operational intelligence platform, Reflex Platform, was deployed in a virtualized environment. The CFO of the company for most of 2014 was Mike Staiger. In 2012–2013 the company expanded into both Europe and Asia.

The majority of the code for the company's Reflex Operational Intelligence is open source, though previous incarnations had not been. Some of the code still remains proprietary. The company has also been involved in the research at AMPLab, located at the University of California, Berkeley.

Financing and acquisitions

After raising $8 million in 2009, by 2012 the company had raised $25 million from firms Intel Capital, Sofinnova Ventures and Artiman Ventures. It then raised another $30 million in early 2013 from Investor Growth Capital and QuestMark Partners, and added another $9 million in financing from Goldman Sachs and TransLink Capital. In January 2013 Guavus acquired the Canadian data company Neuralitic Systems, which now operates as a Guavus company. Neuralitic Systems works with mobile data and interpreting it for mobile providers. In June 2013 the company acquired Pipeline, which analyzes IPDR.