Arun Murthy, a prominent figure in the tech industry known for his pivotal role in the development of Hadoop, has launched a new venture called Isotopes. This classic Bay Area innovation company has recently come out of stealth mode. Commercializing important innovations in data interoperability, they recently raised a remarkable $20 million seed round to address huge market needs. The 2.1 million funding was led by Vab Goel of NTTVC who had formerly been a partner at NorWest Ventures.
Murthy’s ride down the artificial intelligence and big data highway started more than 20 years ago. His first flagship policy advocacy venture came at Yahoo. He soon became part of the vibrant community that created Hadoop. This open-source framework changed the way organizations worked with big data. His experience first set the stage for his next venture, perhaps most notably co-founding Hortonworks in 2011, which spun out of Yahoo! It certainly lived up to its name, as Hortonworks rapidly made its mark, going public within just four years of founding.
In 2021, Murthy left Hortonworks without a clear path of what was to come next. An unexpected email introduction to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, turned his career in a new direction. He likened his experience at Scale AI as akin to getting a PhD. He laid stress on the deep understanding and learnings he gained over those six months.
Understanding the continuing frustrations of big data, Murthy co-created Isotopes with Prasanth Jayachandra and Gopal Vijayaraghavan. The firm’s flagship product, which the company calls a ‘data fabric,’ is meant to help discover and govern data regardless of where it lives. Murthy refers to Isotopes’ agent as “much more than a basic chatbot.” This underscores its deep machine learning capabilities in data processing, distinguishing it from more traditional solutions.
The company has filed for ten patents on its new technology. It believes that this move is a demonstration of its commitment to innovation and leadership in the field. Isotopes’ mission is to simplify data management for organizations so they can save time and money, and improve the speed and precision of data-driven decision making.
This depth of leadership experience is particularly remarkable, as during his time at Cloudera, Arun was responsible for leading a team of nearly 200 employees. In 2021, his influence was felt again as Cloudera made the transition from a public company back to a private company. This change occurred after activist investor Carl Icahn intervened.
Meanwhile, Isotopes is continuing full-speed with its wildly ambitious vision. This is what makes it a true pioneer, blazing the trail into the rapidly evolving frontier of data management solutions. Of course, Murthy’s impressive background in big data is the rocket fuel powering Isotopes’ growth. By delivering cutting-edge technology with proven results, Isotopes continues to cement itself as a leader in solving the most important organizational challenges of our time.
