Quilt Data launches from stealth with free portal to access petabytes of public data

Quilt Data's founders, Kevin Moore and Aneesh Karve, have been hard at work for the last four years building a platform to search for data quickly across vast repositories on AWS S3 storage. The idea is to give data scientists a way to find data in S3 buckets, and then package that data in forms that a business can use. Today, the company launched out of stealth with a free data search portal that not only proves what they can do, but also provides valuable access to 3.7 petabytes of public data across 23 S3 repositories.

The public data repository includes publicly available Amazon review data along with satellite images and other high-value public information. The product works like any search engine, where you enter a query, but instead of searching the web or an enterprise repository, it finds the results in S3 storage on AWS.

The results not only include the data you are looking for, it also includes all of the information around the data, such as Jupyter notebooks, the standard workspace that data scientists use to build machine learning models. Data scientists can then use this as the basis for building their own machine learning models.

The public data, which includes over 10 billion objects, is a resource that data scientists should greatly appreciate it, but the company is offering access to this data out of more than pure altruism. It's doing so because it wants to show what the platform is capable of, and in the process hopes to get companies to use the commercial version of the product.

Quilt Data search results with data about the data found. Image: Quilt Data

Customers can try Quilt Data for free or subscribe to the product in the Amazon Marketplace. The company charges a flat rate of $550 per month for each S3 bucket. It also offers an enterprise version with priority support, custom features and education and on-boarding for $999 per month for each S3 bucket.

The company was founded in 2015 and was a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2017 cohort. The company has received $4.2 million in seed money so far from Y Combinator, Vertex Ventures, Fuel Capital and Streamlined Ventures along with other unnamed investors.