How big is a zettabyte? This startup got funding from Japan’s biggest telco to find out.

Co-founders Toru Nishikawa (L) and Daisuke Okanohara (R)

A petabyte isn’t cool. An exabyte isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A zettabyte.

Big data startup Preferred Networks wants to develop a technology that can do real-time analysis of the zettabytes of data coming from the Internet of Things. NTT, Japan’s largest telco, wants to see them do it and has pledged JPY 200 million (US$1.9M) in development support to see it happen.

Preferred Networks is the Internet of Things-focused spin-off of Preferred Infrastructure, also a big data startup but known for its natural language processing technology. This is Preferred Networks’s first time accepting outside funding. NTT makes a logical business partner because the telco’s development team has been working with Preferred Infrastructure since 2011 when they jointly developed one of Preferred Infrastructure’s flagship services, Jubatus. Jubatus is an open-source data analytics tool design to be an alternative to the popular big data processor Hadoop.

A zettabyte is the data equivalent of space travel’s ludicrous speed. The amount is so massive that even if you collected all the data generated in 2013, the total would only reach 4 zettabytes.

Though Preferred Networks is staffed with freakishly smart engineers, co-founder Daisuke Okanohara was very frank when discussing the team’s current limitations. “The gradual growth the company has experienced so cannot compare to the rapid growth of the internet of things and machine learning. It’s insufficient for competing at an international level,” he told Tech in Asia. He and fellow co-founder Toru Nishikawa believe financial and development support from NTT can help make a difference on this front.

The projects Preferred Networks aims to tackle run a wide gamut. Okanohara highlighted retail sales, automobiles, healthcare, and manufacturing as a few key areas where big data can have an outsized impact on understanding how to capture users, plan urban infrastructure, or figure out the everlasting riddle of efficient logistics.

If the team succeeds, the company’s value would increase significantly. The current NTT deal values the Preferred at no less than US$20 million. If they can achieve real-time analysis of a zettabyte’s worth of data, the firm’s future valuation, and that of its parent company, will likely increase dramatically.

Preferred Infrastructure has not taken outside funding yet. Nishikawa and Okanohara estimate its value to be US$150-200 million.

See: How Asian Companies are Using Big Data

CORRECTION: This article has been modified to reflect that Preferred Networks, not Preferred Infrastructure was the recipient of the funding.