DEALFLOW DASHBOARD / September 11
BIOTECH: Tissuesmed, 6.5M GBP ($9.75M); Cosmix, 5M Euro ($4.51M)
INTERNET: DigiMine, $20M
INTERNET SERVICES: Dynamic Trade, $7M
SOFTWARE: Constractionzone.com, $10M
DEADFLOW DIGEST: E-ppraisal, $3M; Endius, 17M; Home-Link Services, $25M; Luxxon, $21M; Mediastream, $6M; Revelex, $2.5M; Ukibi, $7M; Wasabi Systems $500K.
ELEVATOR PITCH: 67 KHZ, $2M
INTERNET
DIGIMINE
Kirkland, WA
FUNDING: $20M
PRIOR FUNDING: $5M
ROUND: 2nd
CATEGORY: ASP
DESCRIPTION: Provides digital warehousing and data-mining services, (for example, harvesting customer purchases for trends) primarily for B2B and e-companies.
LEAD INVESTOR: Mayfield Fund
OTHER INVESTORS: Second Avenue Fund; Cedar Grove Investments; Kellet Investments; and an ensemble cast of heavy-hitting IT angels.
THE HERRING TAKE: Standing a hulking 6-foit-5 with a gleaming bald skill and coke-bottle spectacles, Dr. Usama Fayyad is perhaps the most recognized data mining specialist on the planet. With Digimine, which launched in March, Dr. Fayyad is experiencing astonishing growth. The funding rounds are oversubscribed and VCs are traveling in droves to his Kirkland, Washington, office. Dr. Fayyad has turned away many investors, and he recently have Intel a “thanks, but no thanks” when it, too, came calling. The thrust of digiMine is intriguing: offer affordable, outsourced data warehousing in a ASP format to companies that otherwise couldn’t afford it. Dr. Fayyad ran Microsoft’s data warehousing division for five years. He left because the software giant viewed data mining and storage as a service and not an application. Dr. Fayyad raised this recent $20 million in less than two weeks and will soon begin his quest for $30 to $50 million more. Only six months old, digiMine, has grown to 65 employees, is generating revenue and has 20 paying customers. Dr. Fayyad is adamant his service is more affordable and efficient than that of arch rival IBM. Big Blue’s solutions cost millions, he says, while DigiMine’s can be had for thousands. During an interview at Red Herring’s HQ Thursday, Dr. Fayyad seemed a little bewildered by digiMine’s hyper-growth and expressed some alarm over his growing $800,000 monthly burn rate. But in the end, optimism prevailed. “People don’t understand what the heck is happening to the web sites,” he says. “If you don’t keep up your company’s data warehouse, then the data will die.”
Source: RED HERRING