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Funding
On January 25, Dremio announced that it had raised $160M in a Series E funding round. This new round comes only a year after a $135M Series D round from last January 2021. Adams Street Partners led the funding round, joined by fellow new investors DTCP and StepStone Group. Existing investor participation came from Cisco Investments, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures. The funding will go towards R+D, customer service, customer education and community-building, and contributions to open source initiatives. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park was quoted in TechTarget on the Dremio investment: Dremio raises $160M for cloud data lake platform technology.
Firebolt Announces Series C Round at $1.4 billion Valuation
On January 26, Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse, announced a $100M Series C round. Aikeon Capital led the round, with participation from new investors Glynn Capital and Sozo Ventures, and existing investors Angular Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dawn Capital, K5 Global, TLV Partners, and Zeev Ventures. The funds will primarily go towards expanding the product and engineering teams. Firebolt also announced that Mosha Pasumansky would assume the CTO position, coming over from Google BigQuery, and that Firebolt would be opening a Seattle office.
On January 26, anch.AI launched its ethical AI governance platform, and secured $2.1M in seed funding. Benhamou Global Ventures led the round, with participation from Terrain Invest, Frederik Andersson, Kent Janer, and Magnus Rausing. The funding will go towards further development of the platform.
Updates and Enhancements
Domino Data Lab Unveils Platform to Accelerate Model Velocity
On January 26, Domino Data Lab debuted Domino 5.0., a major new release of their MLOps platform. Key new capabilities include autoscaling clusters to give data science teams easier access to compute infra; data collectors that will allow teams to securely share and reuse common data access patterns; and integrated monitoring of models in production, with automated insights that compare production data to training data to assess and diagnose model drift. The latest version is available immediately to existing Domino customers, with a trial version available for new customers.
Dataiku Achieves ISO 27001 Certification | Dataiku
On January 27, Dataiku announced that they were now ISO 27001 certified, citing it as a “business imperative” to protect sensitive customer data from improper access and security breaches. ISO 27001 certification is a consideration for enterprises needing to not only prevent security breaches, but also ensure data is appropriately domiciled to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
DataRobot continues its AI education efforts with this week’s launch of MoreIntelligent.ai, an expansion of their More Intelligent Tomorrow podcast. Content will include research and analysis, prescriptive takeaways to inform AI practitioner action, and interviews with prominent AI leaders. The prominence DataRobot is giving More Intelligent works suggests that education about AI continues to be key to growing the AI market.
Introducing Meta’s Next-Gen AI Supercomputer | Meta
On January 24, Meta unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster, aiming to be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it’s completed in mid-2022. Meta plans to use the RSC to build stronger AI models which will analyze text, images, and video together in hundreds of languages, as a step on the path towards the metaverse.
Hiring
Informatica Appoints Jim Kruger as Chief Marketing Officer to Accelerate Cloud Growth | Informatica
On January 24, Informatica appointed Jim Kruger as the Chief Marketing Officer. Kruger was previously the CMO at Veeam Software, Intermedia, and Polycom, bringing years of experience in the CMO role as an experienced marketer who understands how to communicate around complex technologies.