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
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
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.
[…] Amalgam’s Insight: Bringing modeling into the database is a significant performance advantage for MySQL-based machine learning to create ML-friendly data marts. Today’s data world is increasingly complicated as options now exist to bring analytics and machine learning capabilities to the data without needing to move the data. Oracle’s take on this trend is indicative of a potential approach for database providers to move upmarket by taking over some or all of the machine learning support responsibilities. And brining Heatwave in-database provides additional modernization to go with Autopilot, which we saw last year. […]