MapD Technologies

CEO: Todd Mostak

MapD Technologies develops a big data analytics platform that the company says can query and visualize big data at a speed 100 times faster than other systems. The software leverages the massive parallelism of commodity graphical processing units (GPUs) to execute SQL queries across multibillion-row datasets in milliseconds. The system works with its own MapD Immerse data visualization tool or with other visualization tools like Tableau.

Mostak developed a prototype of the technology while at Harvard University after becoming frustrated while waiting hours and even days for a computer system to process patterns in hundreds of millions of tweets – research he needed for a thesis he was writing on the Arab Spring. He created his own computer cluster using computer gaming GPU cards, then pursued the technology at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2013, launched its commercial product in March.