Consider the companies selling big data products: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, EMC.  Generally speaking, big data refers to extremely large volumes of unstructured data.  Such data is also called “dark data“, because it results in missed opportunities when not put to immediate use.  Problem is not enough talented people are working on big data.  And that means the market for such information remains limited to a small amount of sellers and buyers.  Such a situation, along with new data constantly being generated at an increasing rate, results in an industry ripe for disruptive innovation.

Fortunately, Y Combinator has funded at least ten companies working on various solutions that involve tools, data visualization, and big data.  Semantics3 specializes in crawling, curating, and merging data at scale from a variety of sources.  Its most popular product is a growing database of 50 million distinct prices from more than 20 million products.  Zillabyte and Citus Data are two companies with products for analyzing big data.  Mixpanel seeks to help the world learn from its data.  There’s also Segment.io, Chartio, Leftronic, and GinzaMetrics.

Big data has big opportunities well beyond the retail sector, in industries like healthcare, the public sector, and manufacturing.  It will be exciting to see YC companies both creating and integrating these technologies.