Stardog Union raises $6M to de-silo data

Stardog Union recently closed on $6 million in Series A funding, and the Crystal City firm is hiring. The company has its work cut out for it with its Enterprise Knowledge Graph technology, as governmental departments and large companies continually suffer from the weight of their own datasets.

You might be wondering, what is a knowledge graph?

“All of your readers are super familiar with knowledge graphs and use them every day, because what Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are based on monetizing very large datasets, and use knowledge graph information to manage those datasets,” said Kendall Clark, CEO and cofounder of Stardog Union. “It’s a technique for managing large scale datasets, so we provide software for companies to manage their internal data sets using many of the same approaches and techniques that Google and LinkedIn and Facebook use to manage their data.”

Clark founded Stardog more than a decade ago with cofounders Michael Grove, Evren Sirin and $500 in a bank account. The team has so far developed knowledge graphs for NASA and Fortune 500 companies in the finance, healthcare, life sciences, energy, media and government industries.

“We think all Fortune 2,000 companies have this data silo problem and that they should all be customers of Stardog,” Clark said. “We call this the oldest unsolved problem in IT – the data silo problem. All the data inside the firewall is a mess. You can’t just think, ‘Hey, I have an idea to do something with this data. Let me send a query for the answer.’ No. First you have to spend a lot of time coming to terms that the data is basically spread to hell and back.”

The $6 million in funding was led by DC’s Grotech Ventures, with participation from existing investors Core Capital and Boulder Ventures, and will go toward expanding all aspects of the company staff. In other words, Stardog is hiring.

“If you want to be in the enterprise software game and you like D.C. and the Mid-Atlantic, you should hit up our website and check out our job openings,” Clark said. “We have crazy enough rents around here, so you don’t have to move to San Francisco to find those.”