• By
 
• DEBORAH GAGE

Ayasdi Inc., whose data analytics software is based on a branch of mathematics that is more than a century old, has raised another $55 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The company also reported 400% growth in bookings for the fiscal year ended Jan. 30 and a long list of Fortune 1000 companies as customers, including Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Siemens, Lockheed Martin and several others in financial services, technology, health care, government and life sciences.

Ayasdi was started in 2008 by three mathematicians. They include two Stanford University Ph.D.s–Chief Executive Gurjeet Singh, whose degree is from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Harlan Sexton, whose degree is in mathematics—and Gunnar Carlsson, a former chair of the Department of Mathematics at Stanford who recently joined Ayasdi full time.

Dr. Carlsson pioneered the use of a branch of mathematics called topology, which is the study of shapes, to solve real-world problems. In the 2000s, he received $10 million in research grants from the National Science Foundation and DARPA to study problems of interest to the U.S. government, and that work led to Ayasdi.

Ayasdi’s specialty is its ability to apply Topological Data Analysis–which includes statistical, machine learning and geometric algorithms–to complex sets of data and expose patterns that humans may miss.

The key here is data complexity, Dr. Singh said, not data size. One of the earliest uses of Ayasdi’s software was on a set of 12-year-old data on breast-cancer tumors. By representing the data visually, as a color-coded shape, it exposed correlations between the disease and patients’ outcomes that researchers had never noticed, giving clues to more effective treatments for breast cancer, Dr. Singh said.

Ayasdi has now branched into several more industries, and is adding what it calls “sandwiches”–apps on top of the Ayasdi platform–for use by customers in those industries. A health-care sandwich, for instance, has its own user interface and understands how to talk to data from electronic medical records.

Customers are reporting millions of dollars in savings, Dr. Singh said. Mercy Health System, for instance, is using Ayasdi to discover “care paths” for its patients–best practices in treatment based on their diseases and accepted medical procedures that staff can access on computers or iPads.

Lockheed, a government contractor, uses Ayasdi to monitor the status of projects to make sure they are on track.

None of these places could hire enough data scientists or analysts to do this type of work at this scale, Dr. Singh said, and they would also need luck to find some of the patterns in the data that Ayasdi is able to detect.

The new money will be invested in sales and marketing as well as the software. “Machine intelligence for the enterprise is still in its infancy,” he said. “There’s still a lot more to do.”

Kleiner Perkins Partner Ted Schlein, who becomes a board observer, said his firm invested in Ayasdi because it has shown that it is commercially able “to go from big data to important data, and in essence make companies smarter.”

Current investors Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate and Citi Ventures also participated in the round, along with two new investors, Centerview Capital and Draper Nexus Ventures.

Total funding in Ayasdi is now close to $100 million. Dr. Singh said he hopes that the current round will be the company’s last one. He added that he expects the company to be worth $1 billion or more by next year.

Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage