Month: August 2021

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Launches and Updates

Cloudera Introduces Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud

On August 16, Cloudera launched Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud to better manage customer data flows. When too many data flows are deployed into a single cluster, performance often falters, yet choosing larger infrastructure footprints “just in case” is expensive. Cloudera DataFlow was created to automate and manage complex cloud-native data flow operations, automatically scale up and down said streaming data flows more efficiently, and cut customers’ cloud costs. Cloudera DataFlow is generally available on AWS now.

Latest Release of the SnapLogic Platform: Self-service Integration and Automation

On August 17, SnapLogic announced its August 2021 product release, introducing no-code SnapLogic Flows for business users, ELT support to Databricks’ Delta Lake, and zero downtime upgrades, along with updating its API lifecycle and development portal. SnapLogic Flows will enable business users to construct data flows and apps to integrate into popular business software such as Salesforce without needing to know how to code, while allowing IT to provide guiderails and requirements to oversee said apps. New features in SnapLogic API lifecycle management include the abilities to maintain, improve, unpublish, deprecate, and retire APIs, ensuring that older versions aren’t used in error.

Funding

Apollo GraphQL Announces $130 Million Series D Investment to Power the Future of Graph and Application Development

On August 17, Apollo GraphQL announced a $130M Series D funding round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing funders Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures, and new investor Next47. The funding will be used on continuing R+D of open source graph technology to make app development faster and more accessible.

Monte Carlo Raises Series C, Brings Funding to $101M to Help Companies Trust Their Data

On August 17, Monte Carlo, a data reliability company, announced a $60M Series C funding round, led by ICONIQ Growth. Salesforce Ventures, along with existing investors Accel, GGV Capital, and Redpoint Ventures, all participated. Monte Carlo will use the funds to expand its product offerings, support more use cases, and open up to new markets.

Acquisitions

Adapdix acquires Edge Intelligence to bring data and AI closer together

Adapdix, an edge AI/ML platform, announced the acquisition of Edge Intelligence, a data management platform, on August 16. Edge Intelligence will improve Adapdix’ existing EdgeOps Data Mesh with better data management capabilities, and allow Adapdix to expand its existing offerings in edge automation.

Hiring

Fermín Serna Joins Databricks as Chief Security Officer

On August 19, Databricks announced that they had appointed Fermín Serna as the company’s new Chief Security Officer. Serna is coming over from Citrix, where he was the Chief Information Security Officer; before this, Serna was the Head of Product Security at Google. At Databricks, Serna will lead the network, platform and user security programs, as well as governance and compliance efforts.

TigerGraph Adds Industry Leader and Trailblazer to its Executive Team; Announces Fall Graph + AI Summits

On August 19, TigerGraph, a graph analytics platform, announced that they had hired Dr. Jay Yu as Vice President of Product Innovation, and as GM at the San Diego Innovation Center for TigerGraph. Dr. Yu comes to TigerGraph from 18 years at Intuit, where he led the Financial Knowledge Graph project and encouraged graph technology adoption in large commercial cases. TigerGraph also announced the Graph + AI Summit for this fall on two dates, October 5 in San Francisco and October 19th in New York. Both hybrid events will be livestreamed to virtual attendees, as well as including in-person attendance.

Funding

Snorkel AI Raises $85 Million at $1 Billion Valuation for Data-Centric AI

On August 9, Snorkel AI, a programmatic data labeling platform, snagged an $85M Series C round at a $1B valuation. Addition and various BlackRock funds and accounts led the round, with participation from previous investors Greylock, GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe Capital, and Walden. The funding will go towards scaling Snorkel AI’s engineering team and growing its go-to-market team for global sales.

Product Launches and Updates

Mindtech Chameleon 21.1

On August 11, Mindtech announced updates to Chameleon, their synthetic image creation and curation platform for training visual AI systems. Data scientists and machine learning engineers will be able to create the exact annotated images they need to train their visual AI models. Key new features and enhancements include Simulator, which uses real-world behavior modeling to create synthetic data sets, and Curation Manager, which performs visual analysis of synthetic and real datasets to identify diversity and bias. Chameleon 21.1 is available for immediate licensing.

Oracle Announces MySQL Autopilot for MySQL HeatWave Service

On August 10, Oracle announced MySQL Autopilot, a new component of Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave service. Autopilot automates HeatWave, a MySQL query acceleration engine in the Oracle cloud, by building machine learning models to help it learn how to perform optimally. Oracle also debuted MySQL Scale-out Data Management at the same time to improve the performance of reloading data into HeatWave by 100x.

Talend Announces Latest Innovations to Support Journey to Healthier Data

On August 11, Talend announced updates to Talend Data Fabric, its data integration and governance platform. Key innovations include native integration with Databricks 7.3 and AWS EMR 6.2 on Apache Spark 3 to enable faster advanced analytics at scale, private connectivity between Talend and AWS or Azure to support HIPAA and PCI compliance, and adding read/write capabilities to a campaign directly from a data pipeline.

Acquisitions

Qlik Acquires NodeGraph To Enhance End-to-End Analytics Data Pipelines With Interactive Data Lineage and Drive ‘Explainable BI’

On August 12, Qlik acquired NodeGraph, a metadata management platform. NodeGraph’s interactive data lineage function will contribute to Qlik’s “explainable BI” capabilities, while the governance aspects will enhance the Qlik data fabric, and NodeGraph’s impact analysis capabilities will expand Qlik’s SaaS offerings.

Hiring

Customer-Focused C-Suite Appointments Bolster DataRobot’s Executive Leadership Team

On August 12, DataRobot welcomed three new appointments to their C-Suite. Jay Schuren moves up as DataRobot’s first Chief Data Science Officer, having come over in 2017 with the Nutonian acquisition. Sirisha Kadamalakalva joined DataRobot as their first Chief Strategy Officer from Bank of America, where she was the Managing Director and Global Head of AI/ML, Analytics, and CRM Software Investment Banking. Steve Jenner came over from Zscaler, where he was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Engineering.

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding

Dataiku Raises $400M at a $4.6B Valuation to Enable Everyday AI in the Enterprise

On August 5, Dataiku announced that they had raised $400M in a Series E round of funding. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, CapitalG, Dawn Capital, FirstMark Capital, ICONIQ Growth, and Snowflake Ventures, as well as new investors Eurazeo, Insight Partners, and Lightrock.

Presto Company Ahana Raises $20M Series A Led By Third Point Ventures To Redefine Open Data Lake Analytics

On August 3, Ahana announced a $20M series A funding round. Third Point Ventures led the round, with participation from GV, Leslie Ventures, and Lux Capital. In addition, Robert Schwartz, a Managing Partner at Third Point Ventures, will join Ahana’s Board of Directors. With the funding, Ahana will accelerate engineering and contributions to the open source data lake analytics Presto project, and expand its go-to-market team.

Product Launches and Updates

Spell Operationalizes Advanced AI with Comprehensive MLOps Platform for Deep Learning

On August 4, Spell launched the eponymous Spell, an MLOps platform for deep learning. The goal is to reduce the cost of operationalizing complex deep learning models that use natural language processing, machine vision, voice recognition, and other similarly complex models dependent on deep learning.

Exadel’s Open Source Face Recognition Application CompreFace Adds New Features

On August 3, Exadel announced improvements to CompreFace, their open source facial recognition application. The updates include additional services and plugins such as face detection and verification, age and gender detection, support for the facial recognition library InsightFace, an improved user experience, added scalability and GPU support, and JavaScript and Python SDKs to make integration easier.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Alteryx becomes Elite partner in the Snowflake Partner Network to Further Accelerate Analytics and Data Science Automation for Global Organizations

Alteryx made an additional partnership announcement at the end of last week around their efforts to address analytics automation; given the context of the automation acquisitions announced this week, it’s worth mentioning as part of a larger trend. In addition to the BluePrism and PwC announcements, Alteryx has become an Elite Technology Partner in the Snowflake ecosystem, building on the deeper relationship announced in June and reflecting a growing number of Alteryx-Snowflake users working on automated analytics projects.

MuleSoft enters agreement to acquire Servicetrace

On August 2, Salesforce announced their intent to acquire Servicetrace, an RPA provider, and to integrate it into their MuleSoft data integration platform. In particular, Servicetrace’s capabilities will enhance Salesforce’s Einstein Automate, empowering additional workflow automation for Salesforce customers.

ServiceNow to acquire Swarm64 to support the world’s largest workflows

On August 5, ServiceNow announced their intent to acquire Swarm64, a database performance company. Once Swarm64 has been integrated into ServiceNow’s solutions, customers will be able to query their data sources more quickly as part of the workflows they build with ServiceNow’s Now Platform, in addition to working with larger datasets.