NTT DOCOMO Ventures Invests in TileDB, Inc. Which Offers a Universal Data Management Platform

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President and CEO, Yuko Sasahara), has invested, through its fund, in TileDB, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “TileDB”), a U.S.-based startup. TileDB provides a universal database that models any data in a novel multi-dimensional array format, allowing organizations to easily store, access, share, analyze and visualize data with any computational tool at global scale.

The demand for cloud databases to store huge and complex collections of data, so-called Big Data, continues to grow in various industries. The structure of today’s biggest data sources does not fit neatly into traditional database structures such as tables, key-values, and documents. Force-fitting complex data such as natural language processing, genomics, or LiDAR types into monolithic databases has led to hassles for end-users, consequently leaving key verticals underserved.

TileDB has invented a universal database that uses arrays to model any data type, while accounting for modern challenges of cloud storage. Standardizing on a single logical way to work with multiple forms of data allows TileDB to offer high-speed data processing, elastic scalability, extreme interoperability with multiple tools, and global data sharing. TileDB offers TileDB Embedded, an open-source storage engine with numerous language APIs and data science integrations, and TileDB Cloud, a universal database that offers secure data governance and scalable compute.

Currently, TileDB and NTT DOCOMO group are working on the technical verification of a database for “Mobile Spatial Statistics,” population data generated from mobile network operation data. The population data used here includes data modeled as “sparse arrays,” and TileDB is expected to considerably improve the processing and management of data.

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. has come to make this investment with the expectation that TileDB’s solution will become one of the key technologies to support NTT DOCOMO’s big data analysis as well as mobile spatial statistics in the future.