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.