Month: July 2022

Funding and Finance

FeatureByte Emerges from Stealth with $5.7M Seed Round

Feature engineering and management platform FeatureByte launched this week, announcing a $5.7M seed round led by Glasswing Ventures and Tola Capital. The funding will go towards scaling up R+D and go-to-market operations. The FeatureByte founders came from DataRobot, where CEO Razi Raziuddin was the SVP of AI Services and Chief Product Officer Xavier Conort was the Chief Data Scientist. FeatureByte looks to simplify the creation and management of AI model features.

Informatica Reports Q2 2022 Financial Results

On July 27, Informatica announced its Q2 2022 financial results. Revenues of $372M beat expectations by $7.8M; earnings were above expectations at $0.16 per share. INFA is up since the earnings announcement.

Microsoft Announces Q4 2022 Financial Results
On July 26, Microsoft announced its Q4 2022 financial results. Revenues ($51.87B) and earnings ($2.23/share) were both slightly lower than expected. MSFT dipped a bit in the market, but ended the week up.

Updates and Launches

Expert.ai Adds New Features to its Natural Language Platform

Natural language platform Expert.ai made improvements to its natural language platform. Key new features include improved data labeling with active learning capabilities, automatic generation of extraction rules enabling users to generate rule-based models, and pre-trained knowledge models in specific domains.

Fiddler Updates Machine Learning Model Management

Fiddler, a model performance management platform, revealed new capabilities this week. Fiddler customers will now be able to use vector monitoring to better observe models in production involving unstructured data, such as ones based on natural language processing and computer vision. Fiddler will also surface more low-frequency events that can contribute to subtle model drift while concealing issues such as fraudulent transactions. Finally, Fiddler has also unveiled a “single pane of glass” user interface, allowing data science and MLOps teams to view and manage models from a centralized dashboard.

Partnerships

Datafold and Hightouch Debut Integration
Data reliability company Datafold and data activation platform Hightouch announced an integration to alert data engineers whenever a dbt data model change will impact data involved in a Hightouch sync. Hightouch automates data integration from data warehouses to business systems such as CRMs, ERPs, and custom applications; data model changes upstream or downstream can break data syncs. Datafold’s Data Diff combines with Hightouch to alert data engineers to potential issues before they become issues in production.

Domino Data Lab and Alexander Thamm Partner to Scale Data Science in Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Domino Data Lab announced a partnership with consultancy Alexander Thamm to help customers in the German-speaking DACH region accelerate their data science implementation timelines. The Data Science Journey Accelerator will pair Domino’s Enterprise MLOps platform with Alexander Thamm’s consulting services for data science and data engineering. Offerings will include assessments in data strategy, the data science lifecycle, and business value, as well as creating proofs of concept.

Hiring

Debanjan Saha Steps Into DataRobot Interim CEO Role

DataRobot President and COO Debanjan Saha has been appointed interim CEO in the wake of Dan Wright stepping down from the CEO position. Saha joined DataRobot in February 2022. Prior to DataRobot, Saja was the VP and GM of Data Analytics at Google, as well asthe VP and GM for Amazon Aurora and RDS. Saha also spent a decade at IBM, primarily in storage and analytics.

Wright will continue with DataRobot in an advisory role during the executive search for a permanent CEO.

Launches and Updates

Datatron Releases Version 3.0

MLOps platform Datatron released version 3.0 this week. Key new features include integration with JupyterHub, allowing data scientists to operationalize models directly from their notebook-interface coding environment; simpler deployment and management facilities ffor all three major cloud platforms without needing to learn or manage Kubernetes; and an updated logging and operations dashboard, along with single sign-on support.

Oracle and Microsoft Present Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure

On July 20, Oracle and Microsoft announced Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. Azure customers will be able to provision, access, and monitor Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, connecting OD services running on OCI with apps in Azure that use data from those services. Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure is generally available now.

Pecan AI Debuts One-Click Data Science Model Deployment

Low-code automated predictive analytics company Pecan AI added one-click machine learning model deployment to its platform this week. Pecan also added model monitoring targeted towards low-code users, alerting them when models show signs of degradation. These two additions join existing features on the Pecan platform to automate all aspects of model creation and deployment.

Partnerships

Talend Enhances Cloudera Data Platform Support

Data integration platform Talend added new certifications for Cloudera Data Platform on the Public Cloud, and CDP data services including Data Engineering and Data Hub. Talend also revealed new native integrations with CDP Engineering, allowing data teams to autoscale Spark jobs without needing to manually configure and scale clusters.

Acquisitions

SAP Acquires Search Analytics Startup Askdata

SAP has acquired Italian search-driven analytics startup Askdata for an undisclosed sum. Askdata uses machine learning and natural language processing models to make it easier for less-technical users to interrogate data in place. Askdata will become part of a future analytics solution for SAP Analytics Cloud.

Funding and Financials

In addition to the funding rounds mentioned below, Alteryx, Microsoft, and SAP all announced the release dates for their next quarterly earnings reports. Alteryx will report their Q2 financial results on Tuesday, August 2; Microsoft will report their Q4 financials on Tuesday, July 26; and SAP will report their Q2 financials on Thursday, July 21.

AssemblyAI: $30M Series B Round

Automatic speech recognition platform AssemblyAI picked up $30M in Series B funding. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Accel and Y Combinator. AssemblyAI will use the funding to grow their AI research team and accelerate product development.

Deci Raises $25M Series B

Deep learning AI building company Deci raised a $25M Series B round. Insight Partners led this round as well (busy week), with participation from existing investors Emerge, Fort Ross Ventures, Jibe Ventures, and Square Peg, and new investor ICON. Deci will use the funding to grow go-to-market efforts and R+D.

SingleStore Announces $116M F Round, New CFO and GC

Cloud-native analytics database provider SingleStore announced a $116M Series F round of financing this week. Goldman Sachs Asset Management led this round, with participation from current investors Dell Technologies Capital, GV, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM Ventures, and Insight Partners, as well as new investor Sanabil Investments.

SingleStore also welcomed two new [executive level] hires in recent weeks. Chief Financial Officer Brad Kinnish joins SingleStore from Aryaka Networks, where he also served as CFO. Prior to Aryaka, Kinnish was also the CFO at Marin Software, and the managing director of Software Investment Banking at Deutsche Bank. New General Counsel Meaghan Nelson was previously the associate general counsel at Veeva Systems as part of over a decade of legal experience.

Tecton Raises $100M Series C Round

Machine learning feature platform Tecton raised a $100M Series C funding round. New investor Kleiner Perkins led the round, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with new investors Bain Capital Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Tiger Global. The funding will go towards additional hiring in engineering and go-to-market teams.

Updates and Launches

AWS Makes Three New Serverless Analytics Offerings Generally Available

AWS announced the general availability of three new serverless analytics offerings; with these, customers will be able to analyze massive amounts of data without needing to manage the supporting infrastructure. Amazon EMR Serverless will allow customers to run analytics apps using Apache Spark and Hive. Amazon MSK Serverless will simplify realtime data ingestion and streaming. Finally, Amazon Redshift Serverless will allow customers to manage high-performance data warehousing and analytics workloads without having to micromanage clusters.

TIBCO Unlocks the Power of Master Data Management Software-as-a-Service with the New TIBCO Cloud EBX | TIBCO Software
TIBCO ModelOps Significantly Improves Efficiency and Flexibility Across the Enterprise with Impactful AI | TIBCO Software

TIBCO revealed two major releases this week. TIBCO Cloud EBX is a SaaS-based Master Data Management solution, will let users manage their corporate data from anywhere. EBX is part of TIBCO Cloud Passport, a new consumption-based pricing plan enabling SaaS for various TIBCO capabilities. Key features of TIBCO Cloud EBX include a model-driven process for data management; the ability to manage every data domain with hierarchy management, match-and-merge functionality, and search and query capabilities; and easy ways to import and export data in bulk and access it via APIs.

TIBCO ModelOpswill provide self-service data science access to teams including business users, with the aim of deploying more machine learning models faster. All common model formats are supported in ModelOps, and governed models can currently be added to TIBCO Spotfire, TIBCO Data Virtualization, and TIBCO Streaming, with more options to follow.

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

Acquisitions

IBM Expands Observability Capabilities with Databand.ai Acquisition

IBM announced Wednesday that they had acquired Databand.ai, a data observability software provider. Databand.ai looks for issues such as data anomalies, missing or incomplete data, and other problems that come up during the data transformation process. IBM suggests that pairing Databand.ai with IBM Observability by Instana APM and Watson Studio will combine application performance monitoring and data observability into a more complete observability platform spanning a broader spectrum of IT ops. Databand.ai employees will join IBM’s Data and AI group.

Launches and Updates

Meta Debuts Improved Language Translation Model and Dataset

Meta announced Wednesday that their AI researchers had built an AI model, NLLB-200 (No Language Left Behind) that significantly improves the accuracy of machine translation between 200 different languages. Meta also compiled the FLORES-200 dataset to measure NLLB-200’s language performance to ensure high-quality translations. Developers will be able to access both NLLB-200 and FLORES-200, and Meta will award $200,000 in grants for “impactful uses” of NLLB-200; specifically, researchers working in linguistics, machine translation, and language technology, as well as nonprofits translating two or more African languages, are invited to apply.

Ontotext Releases GraphDB 10.0

Ontotext announced GraphDB 10.0, the latest major release of their database engine. Key new features include a new high-availability cluster architecture with higher uptime, zero data loss, better fault tolerance, and better recovery from failures; an improved graph path search algorithm that can run in parallel mode in multicore environments, enabling faster processing on complex searches and the ability to handle more concurrent requests; improved full text search; and a simplified upgrade path requiring no development effort to upgrade from free to standard to enterprise editions of GraphDB.

Databricks Data + AI Announcements

Databricks Debuts Improvements to Data Lakehouse at Data + AI Summit

At Databricks’ Data + AI summit this week, Databricks announced myriad improvements to their Databricks Lakehouse Platform. Key enhancements include improvements to data governance and the Unity Catalog, public (Marketplace) and secure (Cleanroom) data asset sharing, MLflow 2.0 with simplified machine learning model deployment, and resource autoscaling for performance and cost efficiency in Delta Live Tables. Databricks also significantly augmented their data warehousing capabilities with an assortment of developer-focused improvements. But the announcement previewing Photon, their “record-setting query engine for lakehouses,” noting performance up to 12x better than traditional cloud data warehouses, marked a significant shot across Snowflake’s bow.

Notably, Databricks also open-sourced its Delta Lake contributions, to drive Delta Lake adoption and compete with Apache Iceberg and Apache Hudi.

Several companies made related announcements this week about their partnerships with Databricks in concert with the summit. Data security platform Immuta integrated its policy enforcement engine into Databricks’ Unity Catalog for better enforcement of data access policies. Matillion made Matillion ETL available on Databricks Partner Connect, permitting joint customers to more easily import business data into their Databricks lakehouse without requiring pre-configuration. Sigma Computing announced their new Databricks partnership and integration, providing a no-code spreadsheet interface into the lakehouse. And behavioral data creation platform Snowplow also announced a partnership with Databricks. Joint customers will be able to integrate Snowplow data into their Databricks lakehouse, along with Snowplow’s new custom-built web models, to build data-driven apps and composable customer data platforms (CCDPs).

Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park attended the Data + AI summit, and his perspective will be published next week.

Other Launches and Updates

Kyligence Debuts Unified Metrics Store

OLAP platform Kyligence announced Kyligence Zen, a unified metrics store platform. Kyligence Zen automates data pipelines between data lakes and warehouses and the Kyligence OLAP database, providing a centralized location for data analysts for accessing and combining data metrics.

TigerGraph Updates TigerGraph Cloud

Graph analytics platform TigerGraph added new features to its graph database as a service TigerGraph Cloud. The improvements are primarily enterprise-focused: enterprise identity and access management, connectivity meeting enterprise-level security standards, and broader accessibility with more options for regional access on all three major cloud providers, as well as expanding the free-tier support for developer learning to Azure.

Funding

Opaque Systems Raises $22 Million in Series A Funding

“Confidential computing” secure data analytics platform Opaque Systems has raised $22M in Series A funding. Walden Catalyst Ventures led the round, with participation by existing investors FactoryHQ, the House Fund, Intel Capital, and Race Capital, as well as new investors Storm Ventures and Thomvest Ventures. The funding will go towards hiring and accelerating R+D.

Snowplow Raises $40M in Series B Funding

In addition to the Databricks partnership mentioned earlier, Snowplow raised $40M in Series B funds this week. NEA led the funding round, with participation from existing investors Atlantic Bridge and MMC. Snowplow plans to use the funds for hiring, scaling globally, and broadening support for more data types on its platform.

Timecho Raises $10M Seed Round

IoT-native time-series database Timecho, based on open source Apache IoTDB, raised $10M. Sequoia China led the round, with additional support from Cloudwise, Gobi China, and Koalafund. The funding will go towards R+D to better support enterprise-scale IoT needs such as better end-edge cloud collaboration.

Hiring

Bridget Shea Appointed as Dataiku’s New Chief Customer Officer

Dataiku has appointed Bridget Shea as its new Chief Customer Officer. Shea has served in an advisory role with the Dataiku leadership team for several years. Prior to joining Dataiku, Shea was the Chief Customer Officer at Mural, a collaborative intelligence company, as well as leading other global go-to-market teams at Datorama, TellApart, and Yext.