From pioneering research to an unprecedented product

It all started in 1976 with a curious and talented research student, Tore Risch, who then started focusing on databases and query processing after studies and research within the field of AI. His supervisor was Prof. Erik Sandewall at the University of Uppsala—a pioneer within Swedish AI research, and who was supervised in turn by the legendary computer scientist John McCarthy who coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956, and developed the Lisp programming language.

Tore completed his PhD in the database field in 1978, and after some highly inspiring years in Silicon Valley doing a post doc at IBM, working with financial expert systems at Syntelligence, being a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and working as a computer scientist at HP Labs, he was appointed professor in Engineering Databases at the University of Linköping, Sweden.

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‍During all this time, Tore had been focusing on conventional databases which handle only one single type of data representation—the persistent table. In 2000, Tore came back to the University of Uppsala where he was appointed professor in Database Technology, and this time he got in contact with space physicists, in Uppsala and at Astron, the Dutch foundation for astronomy research, who struggled with a different kind of challenge regarding search and analysis of data.

Using radio telescopes, space physicists receive huge amounts of data in continuous streams, so large that it is not even possible to store all the data on any medium for a subsequent data analysis. Instead, the search and data analysis had to be made directly on  moving data in streams, in real time.

This required a completely new approach which Tore started to investigate together with a PhD student, Erik Zeitler, who after completing his MSc degree in Engineering Physics had worked a few years in the internet industry, but then decided to go back to the academic world, looking for new challenges.

‍At this point, Erik went back to the internet industry, working at the Swedish fintech firm Klarna, but he also kept talking with Tore about how their unique research results could be made useful in the industry. They both recognized that they would need some entrepreneurial experience, and a warm summer day in 2014, Erik went to have a talk with an old friend from his college studies, Jan Nilsson.

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And this is where the edge-based strategy of Stream Analyze started to take shape, built around the main software tool, sa.engine, having its roots in the two main unique characteristics of Tore’s and Erik’s research—the capability of searching and analyzing data in large data streams in real time, and building database technology with an extremely small footprint.

Turning these unique characteristics into a mature product, ready for market and built on unprecedented and highly advanced technology, but yet easy to use—a little like Apple’s iPhone, but without locking its users into a closed ecosystem—has also been possible through another growing strength of Stream Analyze while more skilled people have joined the company—a deep and diversified knowledge in its field.

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Or as Tore Risch puts it

‍“Together, we now have an unparalleled competence—essentially a complete department of computer science.”