Mention a tech startup, and for many people the image that comes to mind is of one or more young geniuses in a basement turning a nerdy idea into a multinational. (Think Google or Facebook.)

But not all startups flow from the insights of 20-something wunderkinds barely out of college. Take Dynadec, a Providence firm that formally launched its marquee product, a business software platform called Comet, this month.

Dynadec is short for Dynamic Decision Technologies Inc., and Comet is designed to let companies make more effective use of the massive amounts of data they now collect in the course of doing business each day – from inventory levels to delivery routes to customer counts. In corporate-speak, the process is called optimization.