Guavus raises $9M more in quest to make telcos smarter

There’s gold in them thar telecommunications networks, and Guavus wants to help carriers find it. On Thursday, the San Mateo, Calif.-based big data company announced it has raised another $ 9 million in funding — from new investors Goldman Sachs and TransLink Capital — bringing the company’s total investment to $ 87 million and helping to finance acquisitions and a global expansion into Asia.

In a nutshell, Guavus is trying to make telcos — including “all tier-1 mobile operators” — smarter by letting them make sense of the data they’re networks are generating. Those companies are historically alright at using their demographic and billing data to improve their marketing efforts, but they’ve been largely blind to what’s happening on their networks, Founder and CEO Anukool Lakhina told me during an interview a few months ago. However, he said, “The magic happens in marrying and infusing that network data with the demographic and billing data.”

To get a better sense of how Guavus does what it does, I suggest reading Stacey Higginbotham’s October 2012 interview with Lakhina. You can also watch his presentation from our Structure: Data event just last month.

Guavus has actually been rather busy lately. In January, it closed a $ 30 million funding round and then bought mobile-analytics startup Neuralitic Systems less than two weeks later. When I spoke to Lakhina about that acquisition, he said the plan is to use Neuralitic’s marketing and application expertise to help customers automate business processes, promotions and other functions based on their newfound insights into what’s happening across the entire company.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Pavel Ignatov.