After 2 years in development, Traintracks wants to put big data in a new perspective

After two years of backend development, a new data analytics startup has finally emerged from its Beijing office with a service that it hopes will disrupt the big data industry.

Analytics tool Traintracks has signed on a handful of prominent clients in the first month of its invitation-only private beta, including Netease’s new North American operations, and China’s Tinder-like social network, Tantan. The company already brought in US$160,000 in purchase orders.

Traintracks also announced the completion of its convertible note seed round worth US$360,000. Angel investors include a senior director of engineering at local web giant Baidu and a co-founder of mobile app analytics firm App Annie.

By some estimates, the big data analytics industry is worth US$125 billion worldwide, but independent analytics tools only account for a small portion of the market, says Traintracks CEO Nils Pihl, a native of Sweden with a background in behavioral psychology. Most of that sum instead goes toward companies building in-house analytics tools.

These companies are where Traintracks initially wants to make a name for itself.

"We make it possible for these companies that spend millions of dollars building their own tools for analytics to have something up and running in less than a day," Pihl says, explaining that these companies don’t have to scrap their old systems to use Traintracks. They just have to redirect their data streams to Traintracks’ cloud servers.

China’s big numbers are great for big data

A few other features make Traintracks stand out from its plug-and-play SDK-based competitors, such as Mixpanel, TalkingData, Google Analytics, and KISSmetrics. First and foremost is speed and efficiency.

Nils Pihl, co-founder and CEO of Traintracks

"If we were to run Mixpanel’s entire client base on our backend, it would cost us less than US$60,000 per month. That is meaningful for enterprises," says Pihl. Using existing tools to analyze huge amounts of data often isn’t affordable for companies, but "Traintracks is cheaper than the servers it runs on."

Pihl points to Tantan, one of Traintracks’ first clients and an early-stage company, as an example. The social network sees 50 million "swipes" (like Tinder’s swipe left or swipe right feature) every day. Tantan won’t disclose active user numbers, but says 20 percent of the total install base are daily active users and the number of users doubles every two months. Pihl says Tantan’s data alone amounts to 10 percent of Mixpanel’s entire client portfolio, demonstrating just how big "big data" really is, especially in China.

"Big data is much bigger in Asia than the western world understands. The data sets are so big," Pihl says.

Tantan co-founder Wang Yu agrees, saying, "Operating in China means dealing with everything at a much larger scale, so you have to plan accordingly. Tantan is growing so fast that we’d outgrow traditional analytics tools in a few months."