How big is a zettabyte? This startup got funding from Japan’s biggest telco to find out.

Co-founders Toru Nishikawa (L) and Daisuke Okanohara (R)

A petabyte isn’t cool. An exabyte isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A zettabyte.

Big data startup Preferred Infrastructure wants to develop a technology that can do real-time analysis of the zettabytes of data coming from the Internet of Things. NTT, Japan’s largest telco, wants to see them do it and has pledged JPY 200 million (US$1.9M) in development support to see it happen.

This is Preferred’s first time accepting outside funding. NTT makes a logical business partner because the telco’s development team has been working with Preferred since 2011 when they jointly developed one of Preferred’s flagship services, Jubatus. Jubatus is an open-source data analytics tool design to be an alternative to the popular big data processor Hadoop.

A zettabyte is the data equivalent of space travel’s ludicrous speed. The amount is so massive that even if you collected all the data generated in 2013, the total would only reach 4 zettabytes.

Though Preferred is staffed with freakishly smart engineers, co-founder Daisuke Okanohara was very frank when discussing the team’s current limitations. “The gradual growth the Preferred has experienced so cannot compare to the rapid growth of the internet of things and machine learning. It’s insufficient for competing at an international level,” he told Tech in Asia. He and fellow co-founder Toru Nishikawa believe financial and development support from NTT can help make a difference on this front.

The projects Preferred aims to tackle run a wide gamut. Okanohara highlighted retail sales, automobiles, healthcare, and manufacturing as a few key areas where big data can have an outsized impact on understanding how to capture users, plan urban infrastructure, or figure out the everlasting riddle of efficient logistics.

If the Preferred team succeeds, the company’s value would increase significantly. The current NTT deal values the Preferred at a little over US$20 million. However, when Tech in Asia last spoke with Nishikawa and Okanohara, they ballparked their value at US$150-200 million. The discrepancy is obvious now but, if they can achieve real-time analysis of a zettabyte’s worth of data, the company’s future valuation is going to be a homerun right out of the ballpark.

See: How Asian Companies are Using Big Data

How big is a zettabyte? This startup got funding from Japan’s biggest telco to find out.