Ayasdi: Stanford Math Begets a Data Company
Ayasdi’s software uses advanced math to analyze data in new ways
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Like most of his peers, Gunnar Carlsson spends his time thinking about hairy, theoretical math problems. It’s ivory tower stuff—he’s been a math professor for 30 years—which is just how the people in his field like it. “Mathematicians want to work on the deepest, hardest problems and get interesting intellectual results,” he says.
In 2008, Carlsson, while continuing his work at Stanford, co-founded Ayasdi, a Palo Alto tech startup. Ayasdi, which means “to seek” in Cherokee, is the first company to come out of Stanford’s math department and just received $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.