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.