Ponder.io, a data science startup founded by University of California, Berkeley researchers, is working with early adopters to turn its open source project—a tool to help data science teams work with large data sets—into a product by early next year, according to Aditya Parameswaran, the company’s president.
Downloads of Ponder’s open source projects Modin and Lux, a data visualization tool that can help with insight discovery, anomaly detection and more, have reached close to three million, said Parameswaran. “The early customers are helping us figure the features to be needed for the product,” he said. Ponder is working with customers in financial technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and electronic health records to build its first product.
Ponder’s Open Source initiative focused on Pandas, a data science tool that aids data scientists in processing large datasets. Data research teams have had to spend months redesigning workloads due to the inability to use Pandas on large collections. Modin, Ponder’s initial project, enables teams to employ Pandas for larger sets. GSK, Tesla, Ford, and other significant firms have used Ponder’s open source initiatives.
Ponder raised $7 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and 8VC. Ponder was born out of UC Berkeley’s RISELabs, which also gave rise to other successful firms like Databricks and Anyscale.
