Scale AI’s former CTO launches AI agent that could solve big data’s biggest problem

Summary

Isotopes came out of stealth on Thursday with a healthy $20 million seed round. It offers an AI agent to solve a problem that data analytics products have struggled with for decades: The people who know how to run the big data infrastructure are not the ones who actually need to use the data. With LLMs, business managers can ask questions of their data in natural language. Isotopes’ agent, Aidnn, can provide answers and draft complex planning documents, gathering data from wherever it’s stored like finance apps, ERP, CRM, and cloud storage. There are countless agentic business analytics already offerings out there, but Isotopes’ co-founders have a unique pedigree. Their product is therefore so sophisticated, the startup has already applied for 10 patents, co-founder CEO Arun Murthy told TechCrunch. Just over 20 years ago, when Murthy was in his mid-20s, he worked at Yahoo on the team that built an open source project called Hadoop. Hadoop spurred the initial Big Data frenzy of the 2010s. In 2011, Yahoo spun it out into a company called Hortonworks, with Murthy as co-founder and chief product officer. Just four years after launch, Hortonworks went public. But the rise of new cloud storage tech took its toll on Hadoop’s market, and Hortonworks eventually merged with its biggest rival, Cloudera. The merged company was taken private in 2021 after famed activist investor Carl Icahn got involved. Murthy went to Cloudera for a few years during that turmoil, managing about 200 people. Yet, he says, even there he saw the age-old data access problem. He remembers quarterly conference calls with Wall Street analysts grilling execs on operating details. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 They couldn’t always answer because they didn’t have access to the data. “It was embarrassing,” he admits now. “We were a big data company selling this.” In 2021, he left that job with no real plan on what to do next, and a VC introduced him to Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. After ...