Sense

Sense.io was a data science platform that provided a collaborative environment for analytics, supporting tools like R, Python, and Julia for scalable data analysis. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Tristan Zajonc. In April 2014, the company secured $981K in a seed funding round from investors including Granite Ventures, Illuminate Ventures, and Leonis Capital.

The platform offered a centralized, cloud-based environment where data science teams could manage the entire workflow, from data exploration to production deployment. It allowed users to access data from various sources such as Spark, Hive, Impala, and Hadoop, and could be deployed on a private cloud or on-premise data centers. The service aimed to simplify the process for data scientists by providing a web-based interface for creating and managing analytics clusters, importing data, and building models without needing to leave the native environment. Key features included the ability to turn results into interactive, hosted graphs and manage access controls for sensitive reports.

In March 2016, Sense.io was acquired by Cloudera, a major distributor of Hadoop. The acquisition was an "acqui-hire," integrating Sense's technology and engineering talent into Cloudera's offerings to enhance its platform amid growing competition. Following the acquisition, Sense.io's technology became the foundation for the Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW). CDSW allows data scientists to use their preferred tools and languages to securely run computations on data within Hadoop clusters, accelerating machine learning projects from exploration to production.

Keywords: data science platform, collaborative analytics, Cloudera Data Science Workbench, data exploration, data production, machine learning workflow, R, Python, Julia, Spark integration, Hadoop analytics, acqui-hire, Tristan Zajonc, enterprise data science, model deployment, interactive visualization, cloud analytics