Goldman backs Antuit’s big data ambitions

"The way you manage data and what you can do with it has just changed dramatically," says Arijit Sengupta, Antuit's CEO. "People weren't even thinking about these kinds of models and solutions 3-4 years ago, but more of it is going to happen."

Sengupta, formerly an executive at IBM and Accenture, set up Antuit in March 2013. Zodius Capital provided $3 million in seed funding to get the business started and support the acquisition of Marketwell, providing a readymade footprint in the US. "We saw the play to become one of the leaders in this market if we put together the right value proposition and do organic and inorganic growth and get the right team and capabilities," says Sengupta.

Antuit now has offices in Bangalore, Auckland, New York and Seattle as well as Singapore. Last week Goldman Sachs led a $56 million round of funding - in which Zodius also participated - that will be used to drive an aggressive growth strategy. "If we are not one of the leaders in the next 3-5 years then we would be disappointed," Sengupta adds."

Estimated to be worth $10 billion and growing rapidly, the global big data services market is expected to go through a period of consolidation, although the timeline for this is unclear.

Sengupta accepts there will be a few leaders with significant scale, a weaker middle, and a long tail - destined to get shorter given the sheer number of start-ups entering the big data analytics space. At the same time, he distinguishes this segment from IT services and business process outsourcing in that models are still evolving and there is demand for specialist capabilities that might come from smaller players.

Antuit, which provides analytics that enable companies to assess their supply chain and operations and sales and marketing, serves a combination of Fortune Global 500 and young, high-growth clients. In many cases these are companies that are coming up with analytics in house or relying on a third-party provider and they are unhappy with their current level of service.

Antuit rebuilds the raw data - cleaning it and tagging it properly - and then creates sets of visualizations that, for example, track market share movements or inventory costs. These form the basis for modeling solutions for particular supply chain and marketing problems. As the company expands it may add capabilities in other areas, such as education or HR analytics, but for now the focus is on staying ahead of the curve in core business areas.

"We have to be very paranoid about being up to date because this industry is moving very fast," Sengupta says.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Expansion
• Technology
• Southeast Asia
• South Asia
• Goldman Sachs
• Zodius Capital
• Growth capital
• Venture
• Technology
• Southeast Asia
• India