Big Data Landscape 2016

VC investment in the space remains vibrant and the first few week of weeks of 2016 saw a flurry of announcements of big founding rounds for late stage Big Data startups: DataDog ( 94M), BloomReach ( 56M), Qubole ( 30M), PlaceIQ ( 25M), etc. Big Data startups received 6.64B in venture capital investment in 2015, 11% of total tech VC. In terms of fundamental trend, the action (meaning innovation, launch of new products and companies) has been gradually moving left to right, from the infrastructure layer (essentially the world of developers/engineers) to the analytics layer (the world of data scientists and analysts) to the application layer (the world of business users and consumers) where "Big Data native applications" have been emerging rapidly… The big trend over the last few months in Big Data analytics has been the increasing focus on artificial intelligence (in its various forms and flavors) to help analyze massive amounts of data and derive predictive insights. The recent resurrection of AI is very much a child of Big Data. The algorithms behind deep learning (the area of AI that gets the most attention these days) were for the most part created decades ago, but it wasn't until they could be applied to massive amounts of data cheaply and quickly enough that they lived up to their full potential… In turn, AI is now helping Big Data deliver on its promise.