Bangalore: Sharmila Shahani Mulligan is an Indian-American founder and CEO of ClearStory Data, who recently made big news with her new venture, clearStory data.

ClearStory Data is a big data startup launched lately which makes it possible for companies to get an idea about huge data they have stored in different computers with the help of technology from Google (Map Reduce technology). This technology helps companies to get new insights from previously overlooked data; Shamila has more than 15 years of experience developing software companies in diverse markets.

Sharmila along with co-founders of ClearStory John Cieslewicz and Vaibhav Nivargi came up with this idea who are experienced enough and well aware of the problems faced by customers with big data. "I saw that there were interesting things going on with Hadoop. A lot of people were downloading it but they couldn't use it. It was too complicated to set up," she recalls.Other investors of ClearStory Data include Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and many other well-known individual investors.

Sharmila started her career with Kiva Software, which was later acquired by Netscape for an amount of $180 million. She then moved on to work with Marc Andreessen in his company Opsware which was bought by HP for $1.6 billion and landed into HP. She served Aster Systems which Teradata bought previous year for $263 million.

She holds a masters’ degree in management from Kellogg Graduate School and completed her graduation in Business and economics and BS in computer science from Northwestern University.