Month: May 2022

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

Funding

Data Lineage Platform MANTA Announces $35M Series B

MANTA, an automated data lineage platform, announced that it had raised $35M in Series B funding. Forestay Capital led the round; existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Credo Ventures, SAP.io, and Senovo, and new investor European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also participated.

Informatica World 2022

Informatica Announces Numerous Updates at Informatica World 2022

At Informatica World, Informatica debuted a number of improvements for data management, data analytics, and data governance. New to the fold is INFACore, a plugin for data science and development frameworks to provide data management in data science and data engineering development environments, simplifying the process of composing data pipelines and deploying them to data apps. Informatica also launched Informatica ModelServe, a service to permit users to more easily deploy machine learning models.

Informatica continued growing their portfolio of vertical-specific versions of their Intelligent Data Management Cloud. The IDMC for Healthcare and Life Sciences addresses the need for master data management that provides a “single source of truth” on patient and provider data while complying with HIPAA regulations and significant governance requirements, as well as data quality rules gathered into the Data Quality Accelerator for Crisis Response to cleanse, standardize, and validate healthcare data. IDMC for Healthcare and Life Sciences also supports connectivity to common healthcare software packages. The IDMC for Financial Services complies with financial industry regulations, supports financial industry data standards, supplies a set of financial-industry-specific data rules gathered into the Data Quality Accelerator for Financial Services to process financial data, and provides metadata scanners specialized for extracting metadata from financial data.

Finally, Informatica announced several major partnerships with large cloud vendors. With Google, they launched the Informatica Data Loader for Google BigQuery, a no-code SaaS service that Google Cloud customers can use to quickly ingest data into their Google BigQuery cloud data warehouse. With Azure, Informatica announced a SaaS version of Informatica Master Data Management on Azure, currently in private preview. And with Oracle, Informatica has integrated Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud with Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Exadata Cloud@ Customer, and Oracle Object Storage. Oracle, in turn, has named Informatica as a preferred partner for enterprise cloud data integration and data governance for data warehouse and lakehouse solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Microsoft Build

Microsoft Integrates Power BI Into PowerPoint, Outlook, and the Office Hub; Launches Datamart Capabilities Within Power BI

At their Build conference this week, Microsoft unofficially welcomed Power BI to the Microsoft Office family as it announced significant integrations of Power BI into PowerPoint, Outlook, and the Office Hub at this week’s Microsoft Build conference. Power BI reports can now be embedded into Power Point and Outlook, bringing data interactivity capabilities into presentations and emails, and replacing out-of-date screenshots with live data visualizations that can be sliced, filtered, and drilled down into. Users will also be able to launch Power BI and find and consume related content directly from the Office Hub.

Microsoft also released a self-service “datamart” capability within Power BI. Business analysts will be able to use a no-code interface to build a data mart on top of any data warehouse or combination of data sources that can be centrally managed and governed, without needing to go through IT, saving time on both sides. The data mart automatically generates a dataset ready for report-building in Power BI, and users can find data marts easily in the Power BI Data Hub, Excel, and Teams.

Also at Microsoft Build, Microsoft Azure AI announced two updates to Azure Cognitive Services. Azure OpenAI Service allows customers to implement reasoning and comprehension capabilities for use cases such as code generation, writing assistance, and deconstructing unstructured data. Azure Cognitive Service for Language adds document and conversational summarization capabilities to help surface key information from unstructured data such as documents and contact center calls.

Azure Machine Learning revealed a number of updates. The Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard, now in preview, unites a number of capabilities to assess machine learning models in one pane of glass. Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints allow developers and data scientists to more easily deploy large-scale models; these managed endpoints are now generally available. (Machine learning platform Hugging Face is among the vendors collaboratively announcing their own endpoints powered by Azure Machine Learning’s managed endpoints service.) In addition, new AutoML features include support for natural language processing and image tasks, as well as enhancements for product integration and machine learning ops.

Finally, Microsoft also launched the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, an integrated platform that brings together databases, analytics, and governance. Within the platform, customers have access to four different Microsoft databases, three different Microsoft analytics services, and Microsoft Purview for governance.

Additional Launches and Updates

Alteryx Debuts FIPS-Compatible Version of Alteryx Designer

On May 25, Alteryx announced Alteryx Designer-FIPS, a version of Alteryx Designer that follows the data security and computer system standards specified in the Federal Information Processing Standards. With this announcement, government agencies and other public sector organizations will be able to automate analytics while complying with FIPS.

Hiring

Anaconda Names Shahz Afzal as SVP of Marketing & Strategy

On May 25, Anaconda welcomed Shahz Afzal as the SVP of Marketing and Strategy, to oversee Anaconda customer and open-source community engagement. Afzal was most recently the Global Head of ISV (Independent Software Vendors) at AWS, in charge of go-to-market strategies, data providers, and consulting partners within the AWS Marketplace. Prior to that, Afzal was Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Hybrid Cloud unit, and spent 15 years at Microsoft overseeing cloud transition initiatives. Anaconda also brought Python thought leaders Russell Keith-Magee and Antonio Cuni on board to support Anaconda as a force for data science in Python.

DataRobot Appoints Former Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins as Chairman of the Board

On May 24, DataRobot announced that they had appointed Mark Hawkins as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Hawkins has served on the DataRobot Board of Directors since 2021. Previously, Hawkins was the President and CFO for Salesforce, which went public and increased its valuation by over $200M during his tenure. Hawkins brings to DataRobot 35 years of experience leading finance teams within global technology companies including Autodesk, Logitech, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.

Funding

Heartex Raises $25 Million Series A

Heartex, the company behind open source data labeling platform Label Studio, announced that it had raised $25M in Series A funding. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Bow Capital, Swift Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and angel investors. Funding will go towards R+D for Label Studio, focusing on bias detection and mitigation, labeling automation, and other analytics and data quality management capabilities.

Imply Announces $100M Series D Round at $1.1B Valuation

Imply, an analytics database company, raised a $100M Series D funding round this week. Thoma Bravo led the round, with participation from new investors OMERS Growth Equity and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Funds, and Khosla Ventures.

Launches and Updates

Alteryx Reveals New Cloud Capabilities at Inspire Conference

On May 18, at Alteryx Inspire, Alteryx revealed improvements to its analytics platform. Key new capabilities include text mining and computer vision additions to the Alteryx Intelligence Suite to analyze unstructured data, enhancements to predictive time series modeling in Alteryx Machine Learning, and the integration of Trifacta into Alteryx Designer Cloud, which adds SSH tunneling to enhance cloud security and governance capabilities.

Tableau Cloud Debuts At Annual Tableau Conference

On May 17, Tableau revealed Tableau Cloud, the next generation of its previous Tableau Online offering, at its annual Tableau conference. New features include Data Stories, automatically-generated natural language generated explanations of Tableau Dashboards to help users more thoroughly understand what they’re seeing; expanding the number of Accelerators (customizable dashboard templates) in its Tableau Exchange store; and further integrating Einstein Discovery and Tableau capabilities within Salesforce CRM Analytics with text clustering to extract keywords from large text fields, and bias detection for multi class models to pinpoint the biasing variables in a model to be removed without requiring model retraining.

Franz’s AllegroGraph 7.3 Improves GraphQL Capabilities

On May 17, Franz Inc, a graph database company, announced AllegroGraph 7.3. This latest version includes upgraded GraphQL query capabilities to work with distributed knowledge graphs and data fabrics. Enhancements to the GraphQL APIs will allow for more complex and performant queries to support data-driven apps.

Apollo GraphQL Releases the Supergraph

On May 18, Apollo GraphQL launched what they’re calling the “supergraph,” a layer to facilitate collaboration between backend data and services and the apps and devices on the front end, but with ambitions for supporting future business needs in an agile composable manner. As part of defining their supergraph stack, Apollo is also launching Apollo Router, which processes GraphQL queries and returns results back to the client significantly faster than its predecessor. Finally, Apollo is adding two features to Apollo Studio’s free tier – Schema Checks, which audits newly composed schemas to protect client apps’ processing, and Launches, which provides a window into the schema-checking and schema-launching processes in Studio.

Ground Labs Reveals Enterprise Recon 2.6

Data discovery company Ground Labs announced the general availability of Enterprise Recon 2.6, a tool that allows companies to find and remediate personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information. New features include improvements to data access governance; new reporting features such as risk scoring and labeling; and the ability to scan for sensitive information on data sources like Google Cloud Storage, SAP HANA databases, Salesforce CRM, and Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop.

Komprise Debuts Smart Data Workflows

Komprise, an unstructured data discovery company, announced Komprise Smart Data Workflows, a process to find and discover relevant data across on-prem, cloud, and edge devices, and then direct said data to data lakes and AI and machine learning tools. Core improvements include expanding Deep Analytics Actions to include “copy and confine” actions from Deep Analytics queries, adding the ability to execute external functions via an API, and increasing global tagging and search capabilities in workflows.

Hiring

Databricks Welcomes Trâm Phi as Senior Vice President and General Counsel

On May 19, Databricks announced that they had appointed Trâm Phi as Senior Vice President and General Counsel. Prior to Databricks, Phi served as SVP, General Counsel at DocuSign, where she grew the legal function as DocuSign transitioned to a mature public company. Before that, Phi was the Chief Legal Officer and Chief of Staff at Imperva, and the Vice President, General Counsel at ArcSight, where she led both teams as the companies went public.

Events

Okera to Host AIRSIDE LIVE 2022 May 25-26

Okera will host AIRSIDE LIVE 2022 as both an in-person event in New York and a virtual event. The event will focus on four key pillars: data management, data security, data privacy and governance, and data as a product, to help companies safely and securely put their data to use. Featured speakers include Aaron Carreras and Nate Weisz from FINRA; Cheryl Flink from the Center for Creative Leadership,; Jeff Becraf, head of US Sales for Data and AI at Kindryl; Guy Adams, Chief Technology Officer at dataops.live, and Mike Meriton, co-founder and COO of the EDM Council. To attend the event, register on the Airside LIVE 2022 site.

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

Funding

Hugging Face Raises $100M C Round

Machine learning platform Hugging Face announced May 9 that they had raised $100M in Series C funding. Lux Capital led the round, with participation from Addition, AIX Ventures, a_capital, Betaworks, Coatue, Sequoia, SV Angel, and individual angel investors. Hugging Face will use the funding on R+D, product development, and education.

Predibase Announces $16.25M in Seed and A Round Funding, Emerges From Stealth

Predibase, a low-code machine learning platform, came out of stealth this week and announced $16.25M in Series A and seed funding. Greylock led both rounds, with participation from The Factory and angel investors. The funding will go towards hiring additional engineering and ML talent, as well as the go-to-market strategy and bringing Predibase into general availability.

Pyramid Analytics Closes $120M E Round

Pyramid Analytics, a decision intelligence and augmented analytics platform, announced on May 9 that they had closed $120M in Series E financing. HIG Growth Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings, General Oriental Investments, and Kingfisher Capital, and new investors JVP, Maor Investments, Sequoia Capital, and Viola Growth. Pyramid will use the money on product development, continued R+D, expanding partnerships globally, and hiring to support all of these efforts.

Launches and Updates

Databricks Strengthens AWS Partnership, Announces PAYGO Lakehouse Offering

On May 10, Databricks announced a pay-as-you-go lakehouse offering on AWS, available now. Customers will be able to launch a lakehouse from the AWS Marketplace whether or not they’ve used Databricks before; they can set up a Databricks account from within AWS, and even consolidate their Databricks usage bills into their AWS billing.

Google Serves Up LaMDA 2 Demos in its AI Test Kitchen

At Google I/O, Google unveiled its new Language Model for Dialog Applications (LaMDA) 2 conversational AI model, along with AI Test Kitchen, an app to demonstrate use cases for LaMDA 2. LaMDA is a generative text model, aiming to produce relevant textual responses based on patterns it recognizes from linguistic input. While no date has been announced for general availability, Google plans to open up LaMDA access to small groups of people.

Mindtech Chameleon Now Generates Diverse “Actors” to Address Bias

Mindtech Global, a synthetic data creation platform, has announced updates to its Chameleon platform. Chameleon 22.1 lets users automatically generate millions of “actors” in virtual worlds, creating privacy-compliant synthetic visual data for training computer vision systems. To address known bias issues, the Chameleon actors now have a range of configuration options, including height, build, age, skin tone, and clothing and hairstyle options.

Privacera Announces Release of Platform 6.3 and PrivaceraCloud 4.3

Privacera, a data access governance company, announced the release of the latest version of Privacera Platform 6.3 and PrivaceraCloud 4.3. New features include extending Attribute Based Access Control across all supported data and analytical sources, supplementing existing role-based and tag-based access control mechanisms; along with enhanced support for Google BigQuery, Starburst Enterprise, Databricks, and Snowflake.

ThoughtSpot Expands the Modern Analytics Cloud to Help Companies Dominate the Decade of Data

At their Beyond 2022 event this week, ThoughtSpot announced numerous new capabilities for their cloud analytics platform. Key updates include integrations and connectors for Amazon Redshift Serverless, Snowflake Data Marketplace, Databricks Partner Connect, Dremio, and Starburst Galaxy; templates, code samples, and ThoughtSpot Blocks to accelerate the development process; and automation capabilities to trigger actions based on analytics.

Events

DataRobot AIX 22 Celebrates AI Innovation, June 7-8, 2022

On June 7 and 8, DataRobot will host DataRobot AIX 22, a free virtual event to explore innovation in AI, analytics, and data science. Featured speakers include DataRobot executives Dan Wright, Debanjan Saha, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, and Michael Schmidt. Register for the event at the DataRobot AIX 22 website.

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

Funding

Accern Raises $20M Series B Round

On May 2, Accern, a natural language processing platform for unstructured data streams, announced a $20M Series B round of financing. Fusion Fund and Mighty Capital co-led the round, with additional participation from Gaingels, Shasta Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Viaduct Ventures. The funding will go towards expanding sales and marketing.

dotData Closes $31.6M B Round

dotData, a data science automation platform, announced that it had raised a $31.6M Series B funding round. Otsuka Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Ltd all participated in this round. dotData plans to use the money for product and service development, as well as expanding on sales efforts and business partnerships.

Galileo Emerges From Stealth with $5.1M Seed Round

Data intelligence platform Galileo emerged from stealth earlier this week with a $5.1M seed round. The Factory led the funding round, along with participation from additional angel investors. The funds will be used to accelerate hiring and R+D. The Galileo platform addresses data errors throughout the machine learning model lifecycle, focusing on unstructured data. Galileo is currently in private beta.

Launches and Updates

Domino 5.2 Release Announced, Generally Available in June

On May 5 at the Rev 3 conference, Domino Data Lab announced Domino 5.2, which will become generally available in June 2022. Key new features include the IntelliSize capability within Domino’s Durable Workspace, which will recommend the optimal size for a model development environment; a new data prep and visualization environment based on Apache Superset; integration with Snowflake to train models in-database in Snowpark, then deploy them to the Data Cloud for in-database scoring; and realtime model monitoring in the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Exasol Reveals New Capabilities for Exasol SaaS

Analytics database company Exasol announced that its Exasol SaaS database now interfaces natively with Keboola, a cloud-based Data Stack as a Service platform. In addition to the Keboola collaboration, additional new capabilities of Exasol SaaS include enhanced machine learning capabilities within the database, support for data virtualization without needing to migrate data, and an Amazon SageMaker extension that uses SageMaker AutoPilot to develop machine learning projects based on data stored in Exasol.

Google Cloud Launches New Data Solutions for Manufacturers

This week, Google Cloud launched two data solutions specifically for manufacturers, Manufacturing Data Engine and Manufacturing Connect. Manufacturing Data Engine integrates a number of key Google Cloud products (such as BigQuery and Looker, among others) with a platform for ingesting, transforming, storing, and providing access to factory data. Manufacturing Connect is an edge solution that can connect to and stream machine and sensor data from manufacturing assets and systems directly to Google Cloud.

MathWorks Launches Startup-Targeted Suites

MathWorks is now offering tech startups access to suites that include MATLAB, Simulink, and over 100 industry-specific development tool stacks at a reduced price. Startups who meet MathWorks’ criteria as determined through an application process may be eligible for “startup-friendly” pricing based on company size, annual revenue, and how long the company has been in business. Access to the MATLAB suite for qualified startups now starts at $1500 for an individual seat, while pricing for the MATLAB and Simulink suite starts at $3600 for an individual seat. Electric vehicle and automated driving startups are highlighted as particular areas of interest on the MathWorks for Startups website.

Starburst Announces New Capabilities for Galaxy, Enterprise

At the Trino Summit this week, analytics engine company Starburst revealed new capabilities for its Starburst Galaxy and Starburst Enterprise products. Galaxy now includes a new lakehouse capability, Great Lakes Connector for object storage catalogs, which now supports the Iceberg and Delta Lake table formats in addition to Apache Hive, allowing access to all of these formats in one data lake. New features for Enterprise include built-in access control for consistent governance across Enterprise, as well as a REST API to make it easier to build and use data products.

Hiring

CIA CISO Joins Salesforce – Salesforce News

On May 5, Salesforce announced that former CIA Chief Information and Security Officer William MacMillan has joined Salesforce as the SVP of Security Product and Program Management, BISO, and Acquisition Integration. MacMillan joins Salesforce after a nearly 20-year career with the CIA culminating in the CISO role. Prior to that, MacMillan was a combat rescue and special operations pilot in the Air Force.