After a successful career working for Sun Microsystems, Sumaya began to realize the importance of social data intelligence and the opportunity to help large companies mine and analyze all this information so she started Sumazi in 2011. She officially launched at Techcrunch's Startup Battlefield which helped her get some valuable attention from clients and investors. Over the past 6 years she's raised a little over $1 million from a dozen or so angel investors. The company is still running lean and getting most of their new clients through referrals and word of mouth. Learn more at Sumazi.com

In this interview I spoke with Sumaya about her journey as an entrepreneur, why she left the corporate world to pursue her startup idea, what the first version of the company looked like and what they have pivoted into over the years, how she raised that first round of capital, how she landed clients like Microsoft and Accenture, how she was able to get into Startup Battlefield despite not having a finished product, what have been her biggest challenges as well as her biggest successes, what are her primary goals for 2017, will a stripped down version of her product offering be available to smaller companies, who is her dream client and much more.

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