Richard Dale splits from Sigma to raise money for new VC firm, Big Data Boston

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The "big data" sector continues to gain steam locally, with a new VC firm called Big Data Boston that is out trying to raise $25 million. The firm doesn't yet have a web site or an office, but its founder is Richard Dale, a former principal at Boston-based Sigma Partners and a co-founder of the life sciences software company Phase Forward, which was acquired by Oracle for $685 million. Dale was also VP of operations at Vermeer Technologies, the very early maker of website creation software that was acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Big Data Boston, VC industry sources tell me, intends to invest in software and services startups, but not hardware companies.

Dale told me he couldn't comment on his fundraising efforts, but he was willing to talk about the big data sector in general, and his departure from Sigma. And he did note that he has made some recent investments as an angel, in two recent TechStars Boston startups: Mortar Data and Ginger.io.

"My observation about the term 'big data' is that that it's data with volume, velocity and variety that is growing faster than Moore's law," Dale says. "In the old days, most data problems could be solved as computing speed caught up. Now, there's this deluge of new kinds of data which is growing faster than Moore's law. It can be sensor data, like images, or behavioral data, like clicks on a website. We've basically broken what Moore's law can cope with, and so we need a bunch of new technologies to get on the right side of that again."

Dale did confirm that he's "transitioning out" of the Boston office of Sigma, which recently separated from its Silicon Valley office, set out to raise its own $150 million fund, and rebranded as Sigma Prime. But it sounds like there are no hard feelings: the three managing directors of that firm have committed to invest in Big Data Boston, sources tell me.

So has local angel and entrepreneur Andy Palmer, who has helped start a handful of big data companies, including Vertica. "I believe that one of the very few successful new models for venture investing is the small and 'hyper-focused' fund model," he writes via e-mail. "Richard is hyper-focused on big data/analytics startups in Boston."