I was having lunch with Sean Parker a couple of weeks ago. Right before he left, he said something profound:
“Drop the data. Just Grata. It’s cleaner.”
So we did.
And that may have been his biggest contribution to our company.
Today, we turn the chapter on the often mispronounced Grata Data. Throughout the years, I’ve heard “Great-a Day-ta,” “Grat-uh Dat-uh,” and the occasional “Gratadata” (one word, no pauses).
Alas, the data is no more. That’s not to say there’s less data in Grata. In fact, we have the most data we’ve ever collected in our short history as a company: we’ve crawled over 100M web pages and found over 6M companies. We now process 100k data points every day and log a new search every minute.
If we have so much data, why drop the data?
In 2006, Mathematician Clive Humby coined the phrase “Data is the new oil.” Through our years as Grata Data, we’ve learned that oil, while valuable, is a commodity nonetheless. What can you do with oil? In its raw form, nothing. It must be distilled, processed, and served in products that people can consume.
If data is our oil, then our product is search. That’s right, not data. Search. We help our users find companies they otherwise wouldn’t find. Our users come to Grata to run thematic searches or find companies that have specific products, services, features, end verticals, or any combination thereof. This is not something you could ever do in Google. You’re not querying an alphabet soup of keywords or a short description you read in a database. It’s company search and it’s what makes Grata unique. If your problem is finding companies, then Grata is your solution. That means finding acquisition targets for private equity firms and investment banks, finding customers and partners for business development teams, finding clients for recruiters, and, in the future, hopefully finding much more that we haven’t even thought of.
I’m going to let you in a little secret about Grata. What does our name actually mean? Grata stands for “Graphical Data.” While we’ve dropped the data upfront and center, we actually haven’t dropped the underlying data. It’s part of our everyday, our DNA so to speak. We’re building the largest knowledge graph of companies. That knowledge graph is powered by deep qualitative data on what a company does, how it serves its customers, which customers it sells to, and how these are connected in our ever changing economy.
In the next few months, we’re making big steps in sharing this capability with our customers. Early this summer, we’ll be launching an API as part of our Monoceros release (on the heels of Canis Major). Until now, our data has been behind the search box. With Monoceros, we’re bringing search to your box, along with all of the underlying qualitative information (read: information, not data) that powers search.
To set the record straight, in case you didn’t realize by now, I don’t know Sean Parker. But the rest is true. You can now find us at grata.com.
Email or Linkedin message me if you want to talk search or are interested in our upcoming search API!
