News and data analytics platform Heckyl Technologies has raised over $3.5 million in Series B investment led by IDG Ventures India, with existing investors Seedfund Advisors and Rajiv Dalal, an angel investor also participating. As part of the deal, Venkatesh Peddi from IDG Ventures will join the board of directors of the company. Seedfund Advisors had previously invested $1 million in the firm. Heckyl offers its services to financial community, providing news clustering, real time price analytics, sentiment analysis based on NLP to gauge the impact of news on the stock market, visualizations such as heat maps, and most importantly, integration with existing trading analytics systems. It claims that its news and derivative analysis platform has more than 20 broking houses on-board, including Angel Broking, Sharekhan, Motilal Oswal, IndiaInfoline, Religare, among others. It appears the company is now preparing to adapt the product for global markets and is also planning to release a data mining platform for financial institutions and the hedge fund business. Heckyl was founded in Dec 2010 four ex-Merrill Lynch execs: Abhijit Vedak, Jaison Mathews, Mukund Mudras and Som Sagar. Competition: India has seen a steady increase in the number of big data analytics companies entering the market here in the last few years. Walmart launched its Walmart Lab in November 2011 in India to focus on big data generated through mobile and social media. Yahoo had opened its lab for big data inside the IIT Madras campus. Earlier this year MasterCard Advisors, a division of MasterCard had acquired an undisclosed stake in Mu Sigma, an analytics and decision…
