Year: 2022

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April 1: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Arize AI, Black Crow AI, Cloudera, Datafold, dbt Labs, Indico, Oracle, Pinecone, Snowflake, Tableau)

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

Funding

Black Crow AI Raises $25 Million Series A
On March 31, Black Crow AI, a digital-commerce-focused no-code machine learning company, announced that it had raised $25M in Series A funding. The round was led by Imaginary Ventures; other participants included Good Friends, Interplay, Left Lane, and Red Antler, as well as individual investors who primarily have founded digital commerce companies. Black Crow AI will use the funds to accelerate R+D of new machine learning use cases in digital commerce and related verticals.

Amalgam’s Insight: No-code machine learning is an approach that will quickly move into all verticals and be used to bring models and complex analysis to line-of-business employees. Data analysts should keep track of the no-code solutions appearing in their industries as potential augmentations to their existing analytics toolkits.

Pinecone Announces $28M Series A Financing
On March 29, Pinecone Systems, a vector database company, announced that they had completed a $28M Series A financing round. Menlo Ventures led the round, with participation from new investor Tiger Global and previous investor Wing Venture Capital. Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures, will join Pinecone’s Board of Directors as part of the transaction. The funding will go towards hiring in product, customer success, and R+D, with specific investments in machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing research.

Amalgam’s Insight: Amalgam Insights continues to posit that enterprises need multiple data formats to support high performance analytics and machine learning, including vector and graph-based approaches. No company ever brags about having the most outdated and least useful data technology, and for good reason. Amalgam also notes the engagement of the ever-present Tiger Global in this round as Tiger continues to be an aggressive investor in emerging tech.

Product Launches and Updates

Arize AI Launches Self-Serve Access Option, Free Tier
Arize AI, a machine learning observability company, announced the latest version of their platform at their Arize:Observe 2022 Summit this week. Notable enhancements include self-serve options, as well as a free tier that allows access to the full Arize platform for up to two models, 500 features per model, and half a million production predictions per month.

Amalgam’s Insight: Observability for machine learning models and applications continues to be a struggle both to support highly performant models and to provide visibility and lineage from data quality and output effectiveness perspectives. This announcement provides developers and data scientists seeking to operationalize machine learning with a free option to automate aspects of the boring side of ML monitoring.

Indico Data Unveils Indico 5
Indica, an unstructured data processing platform, released Indico 5 this week. New features include automatic document unbundling, even of complex PDFs such as mortgages; linked labels that capture the relationships between document elements; native support for reading over 70 languages, both in print and in handwriting; and Workflow Canvas, a visual interface for users to build and review their document processing automated workflows.

Amalgam’s Insight: Document parsing and tracking are still challenging across banking, healthcare, insurance, legal, and contract management use cases. Language processing capabilities that were considered highly specialized in the past are quickly becoming standardized and expected in the workplace.

Oracle Announces MySQL HeatWave ML
On March 29, Oracle announced that Oracle MySQL Heatwave now supports in-database machine learning. Previously, Heatwave supported transaction processing and analytics. With the new machine learning support, both the data and model reside in the database, making moving the data and model for training no longer necessary.

Amalgam’s Insight: Bringing modeling into the database is a significant performance advantage for MySQL-based machine learning to create ML-friendly data marts. Today’s data world is increasingly complicated as options now exist to bring analytics and machine learning capabilities to the data without needing to move the data. Oracle’s take on this trend is indicative of a potential approach for database providers to move upmarket by taking over some or all of the machine learning support responsibilities. And brining Heatwave in-database provides additional modernization to go with Autopilot, which we saw last year.

Snowflake Launches Retail Data Cloud
On March 28, Snowflake launched the Retail Data Cloud, focused on the data needs of retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and consumer packaged goods vendors and their technology partners. As part of this launch, a number of technology vendors announced related Partner Solutions, including partners like Amazon, DataRobot, Dataiku, Robling, and Tableau.

Amalgam’s Insight: At first glance, this reminds us of the Informatica announcement for the Data Management Cloud for Retail last week. Retail is always a challenging arena for managing data and Snowflake seeks to show its market presense both with this launch and their 1,000+ retail and Consumer Packaged Goods clients.

Tableau 2022.1 Release
Tableau released version 2022.1 earlier this week. Highlights include the new Workbook Optimizer, which evaluates workbook characteristics against known best practices and flags potential improvements in design and speed; improvements to search; Ask Data enhancements permitting a hybrid approach for asking data questions that are hard to put into natural language; Enterprise Deployment Guidelines to help enterprise architects optimize Tableau Server deployment; and setting resource limits on jobs that run in the background on Tableau Server.

Amalgam’s Insight: Tableau continues to focus on the data analyst and is starting to take full advantage of having moved to the cloud in being able to improve workbooks based on the best practices of other Tableau users. In addition, Tableau continues to show improvements in scaling Tableau Server as it continues to be a standard in enterprise analytics.

Partnerships

Datafold and dbt Labs Partner, Launch Integration to Deliver Trusted Data Faster
On March 30, Datafold and dbt Labs announced that they had partnered to produce an integrated way to deliver trusted data faster. Complex data models needing regular updates require testing to understand how they ought to perform in production, but analytics engineers don’t have time to write the thousands of tests needed for a proper evaluation. Datafold now automates regression test creation, saving analytics engineers time in deploying updates to dbt Labs data models in production.

Amalgam’s Insight: Regression testing is a time-consuming aspect of bringing data into production and this challenge will only continue to be more difficult with time as the volume and variety of data increase. Test automation must be brought into any organization seeking to significantly scale the amount of data it wants to analyze.

Hiring

Alteryx Selects Gari Johnson as Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan
On March 28, Alteryx announced that they had appointed Gari Johnson as the senior Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan, leading business strategy and operations for Alteryx in the region. Johnson joins Alteryx from Zendesk, where he was the Senior Vice President of JAPAC (Japan and Asia Pacific). Prior to Zendesk, Johnson was the Area Vice President APAC in Cloud Sales at Salesforce, leading the Enterprise Sales team for cloud solutions.

Amalgam’s Insight: Alteryx continues to expand its executive reach on a global basis to fully access its potential addressable market. Amalgam Insights looks forward to seeing how this affects both Alteryx’s direct sales approaches and partnerships in APAC.

Cloudera Welcomes Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Legal Officer, EVP+GM of Cloud
Cloudera announced a slew of executive appointments this week. Abhas moves into the Chief Strategy Officer position, after having served as Chief of Staff and Vice President for Business Transformation at Cloudera subsequent to the merger with Hortonworks. At Hortonworks, Abhas was the Senior Director Global Head of Strategy, Innovation, and Sales. Irma Laxamana advances to Chief Legal Officer from her previous position of Deputy General Counsel, Vice President, also within Cloudera. Laxamana came over to Cloudera with the Hortonworks merger as well, having served as VP and Deputy General Counsel for five years there. Prior to that, Laxamana also served as Senior Counsel at GoodData and VMware. Prat Moghe moves up to the EVP and GM of Cloud post from a year as the SVP of Cloud at Cloudera. Moghe’s prior company, Cazena, was also acquired by Cloudera; he was the founder and CEO there.

Amalgam’s Insight: Cloudera expands its C-Suite as its corporate integrations have completed and Cloudera has identified multiple executives to elevate. Amalgam finds it especially interesting to see Prat Moghe, a multiple-time founder, being promoted to GM of Cloud and looks forward to seeking how this affects Cloudera’s roadmap.

Events

Alteryx Announces Hybrid 2022 Inspire Conference
Alteryx Inspire 2022, Alteryx’s annual customer and partner conference, will take place in person this year, May 16-19 in Denver, CO, as well as online. Highlights include an executive summit for line-of-business, data, and IT executives; opportunities for product training and professional development; and the return of the Alteryx Grand Prix, where Alteryx power users solve analytics challenges at speed relying on their knowledge of the Alteryx toolkit. Register to attend Alteryx Inspire.

Amalgam’s Insight: The Alteryx Grand Prix is one of the most interesting activities in analytics, as it successfully turns data analyst work into a spectator sport. Our analysts have been to Alteryx events since 2013 working for a variety of companies and can vouch that it is a must-watch for anyone interested in analytic challenges. Interestingly, this event is happening at the same time as Tableau Conference (May 17-19) and it will be interesting to see if these once-close partners provide competing or joint products at their events.

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HP Offers to Acquire Poly

On March 28, HP announced an offer of $3.3 billion to acquire integrated communications vendor Poly. Poly, created from the merger of Plantronics and Polycom, acquiring @PolyCompany is interesting because both firms have a long history of supporting remote and home offices. Both companies have dealt with the challenges of the digital office. But this acquisition hints at a potential split for HP.

HP is obviously known as a printer company and printer ink prices ($3,000 per gallon) make even the most expensive gas pumps look like amazing bargains. But HP also has its Z by HP workstation brand, which is well-aligned to the Poly portfolio. It would be great to see that combined Poly/Z portfolio come together as the future of the digital office and to create that new “office in a box” or “office in a browser” that is always a goal for tech companies. There are still a few gaps in the portfolio, though.

The starting point is good spatial audio. As Poly has known since its telepresence days, 2 big secrets to optimal video conferencing are life-sized video and spatial audio. Both are hardware accessory issues: camera & speakers. Poly is great at the former, so-so at the latter. To take this a step further, HP Poly can be the smart accessory (and maybe even the programmable accessory) company providing all of the accessories beyond the phone and PC to support a better office, but this also requires continued API investment. Poly could have been the smart watch & VR headset company, but didn’t keep up. The opportunity is still there if Poly takes the immersive home office seriously and provides the one-stop shop for transforming the kitchen/guest bedroom/garage/remote office room into a communications hub.

And all that video and audio data is an obvious fit with the #datascience @ZbyHP portfolio. So, if all this makes sense, what is the issue?

Printer Ink.

For HP to pursue this path, it must embrace a business model path with one eye towards the actual Metaverse: VR, AR, workflow digitization, & eliminating the need for print. Z/Poly provides an obvious set of next steps: smart accessories, continued growth of the developer community, process automation & workflow orchestration Printers can be a part of this future if they are “iPhoned” to support higher dpi & eliminate the need for constant ink but anybody who has ever tried to implement a printer from scratch knows just how prehistoric this experience is compared to the mobile, SaaS, Big Data world that is pervasive in our consumer lives where even our refrigerators and light bulbs are now able to give us recommendations.

Does HP have the stomach to truly disrupt itself over the next decade, as Netflix wiped out its mail business & destroyed the value of its DVD library? Or will it spin out Z/Poly to maximize value? Or will Poly become a cash cow held back by legacy HP? HP now has more tools to truly reinvent the digital home office when remote employees can dip into the real estate budget. It will be fairly clear within this calendar year which of these three options ends up being HP’s true intentions: wither, cash cow, or innovate.

For the sake of the innovative geniuses who have worked at Plantronics and Poly love the years, I really hope their technology gets a chance to reach the next level. And as an analyst, I look forward to seeing what big brains @blairplez @DaveMichels @zkerravala have to say about this proposed acquisition as I have found their guidance and perspective invaluable over the years as an analyst who has dabbled in their market.

From a Technology Expense Management perspective, the big takeaway here is that the telecom environment is going farther and farther away from the dedicated phone systems and now even mobile devices that have traditionally been the hub of voice and video. HP’s acquisition of Poly will be part of a trend of creating more focused home office solutions as the future of the hybrid workplace requires less investment in 100,000 square foot (10,000 square meter) headquarters spaces and more investment in the 20 square feet (2 square meters) that we choose to work in at any given point. These accessories will require purchasing and tracking just as all business assets require and may have additional connectivity or computational support demands over time just as smartwatches, connected Internet of Things devices, and devices using edge computing require. Connected devices belong in a unified endpoint management solution, but this HP acquisition may start leading to some questions as to whether remote office management is part of a managed print strategy, enterprise mobility strategy, or general IT asset strategy. Amalgam Insights recommends that remote office tech investment, which will eventually match enterprise mobility as a $2,000/employee/year total cost of ownership for all relevant hybrid and home employees, should be handled as part of an enterprise mobility strategy where device management and logistics have already been defined.

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March 25: From BI to AI (Astronomer, C3 AI, Datagen, Dataiku, Datakin, Domino, HEAVY.AI, Hex, Informatica, NVIDIA, Snorkel AI, Talend)

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

Funding (and an Acquisition)

Astronomer Raises $213 Million Series C and Acquires Datakin; Scales Operations Amid Booming Growth and Global Demand
On March 23, data orchestration platform Astronomer announced that it had raised a $213M Series C round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from JP Morgan, K5 Global, Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Venrock. The funding will be used for hiring in engineering and Customer Success, scaling up go-to-market operations, and R+D. Astronomer also revealed in the same announcement that it had acquired Datakin, a data lineage solution, and will be integrating it into Astronomer.

Datagen Obtains $50 Million in Series B Funding

Datagen, a synthetic data generator for computer vision systems, announced March 23 that it had closed $50M in Series B funds. Scale Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Spider Capital, TLV Partners, and Viola Ventures. As part of the transaction, Scale Venture Partners’ Andy Vitus joins Datagen’s board of directors.

Hex Raises $52M Series B

On March 22, Hex, a collaborative data science and analytics platform, announced that it had raised a $52M Series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Additional participants included new investors Snowflake and Databricks, as well as existing investors Amplify Partners and Redpoint. Funding will go towards hiring and research and development.

Product Launches and Updates

C3 AI Version 8 to Accelerate the Development of Enterprise AI Applications – C3 AI

On March 23, C3 AI announced that C3 AI Application Platform Version 8 was now generally available. Key features of the newest release include additional pre-built and extensible AI apps for supply chain planning and execution within C3 AI Applications; C3 AI Virtual Data Lake, a way to aggregate an organization’s data into one image to mitigate the need to replicate said data for analytics and AI processing; C3 AI Data Vision, which enables AI-driven knowledge graphs to facilitate more advanced data visualization and AI discovery; C3 AI Studio, a low-code AI app development environment; and C3 AI Ex Machina, a no-code machine learning canvas.

Domino Data Lab Announces NVIDIA Fleet Command Support
Domino Data Lab announced new integrations with NVIDIA in the wake of GTC 2022. Domino now supports NVIDIA Fleet Command, permitting model deployment on edge devices. In addition, Domino’s Enterprise MLOps platform is now available through NVIDIA LaunchPad, a way to run pilot projects to assess appropriate purchase decisions for data projects.

HEAVY.AI Introduces Version 6.0

On March 22, HEAVY.AI announced a limited release of HEAVY.AI 6.0. Key new capabilities include HeavyConnect, a way to analyze and visualize an organization’s data wherever it is without moving or copying it; performance improvements for HeavyDB and HEAVY.AI overall; an admin panel for Heavy Immerse providing thorough oversight of existing deployments; and in beta, the ability to integrate machine learning models into the analytics workflow, both in Heavy Immerse and by SQL queries. HEAVY AI 6.0 will be generally available in April.

Informatica Launches Vertical-Specific IDMC for Retail
On March 24, Informatica announced the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail, focusing on retail-specific challenges in data fragmentation and the complexity of a multi-cloud hybrid environment. Spotlighted issues addressed include upgrades to data governance and privacy capabilities, improving inventory visibility and demand forecasting capabilities, and enabling customers to provide more personalized shopping experiences.

NVIDIA AI Improves on Speech, Recommender System and Hyperscale Inference Capabilities
At GTC 2022, NVIDIA announced updates to its NVIDIA AI Platform. These updates include improvements to NVIDIA Triton, a model inference solution; NVIDIA Riva, a speech AI SDK; NVIDIA NeMo Megatron, a training framework for large language models; NVIDIA Merlin, a recommendation AI; and NVIDIA Maxine, an audio and video enhancement SDK. In addition, NVIDIA released AI Enterprise 2.0, with certification for Red Hat Open Shift, allowing customers to use containerized machine learning tools across a variety of data centers and cloud platforms.

Snorkel AI Announces Snorkel Flow
Snorkel AI announced that Snorkel Flow, its AI platform with automated labeling, was now generally available. Snorkel Flow key features include programmatic data labeling; a no-code machine learning modeling suite; workflows to improve training data quality, and for domain experts to provide input on data labeling; and templates for document classification and extraction.

Talend Data Catalog 8 Updates Focus on Data Compliance
On March 24, Talend announced the availability of Talend Data Catalog 8, part of its Talend Data Fabric platform. New capabilities in this release include automated data classification to classify data around things like compliance violations; the ability to export data lineage and transformation logic via APIs to meet compliance requests; and tailored business modeling to define domain meta models that most accurately match business priorities.

Hiring

Dataiku Brings Aboard Adam Towns as CFO

On March 23, Dataiku announced that they had hired Adam Towns as their Chief Financial Officer. Towns, well-experienced in tech finance, joins Dataiku from Sisense, where he was the CFO, leading their global finance and business operations team. Prior to that, Towns was the Senior VP of Strategic Finance and FP&A at Mimecast, where he brought the company through its IPO, increasing revenue by 15x and headcount by 20x during his tenure there.

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March 18: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Databricks, DataRobot, Dataiku, Domino Data Lab, H2O.ai, Microsoft Azure, Redis, Salesforce, Snowflake, Synthetaic, Tecton)

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

Featured: Healthcare Data Announcements During HIMSS22

In the wake of Databricks rolling out its healthcare-specific data lakehouse last week, along with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference (HIMSS22) happening this week, several other enterprises made healthcare data-related announcements in the last few days.

H2O.ai Reveals Portfolio of Healthcare AI Apps

On March 11, H2O.ai announced an expansion of its healthcare data capabilities, offering 40 AI applications within Population Health, Precision Medicine, Public Health, and Intelligent Supply Chain. Notable apps include a COVID-19 hospital occupancy simulator, COVID-19 forecasting, a gene mutation risk assessment app, and a route optimizer app for supply chain support for health manufacturers.

Microsoft Announces General Availability of Azure Health Data Services, Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

On March 15, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Health Data Services, along with improvements for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Key features of Azure Health Data Services include the ability to securely transfer protected health information (PHI) in the cloud, along with connecting it to other apps within the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Notable relevant updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include Text Analytics for Health to improve clinical and operational insights by extracting insights from unstructured medical data and transforming it into Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format.

Salesforce Announces Improvements to Customer 360 For Health
On March 16, Salesforce announced new capabilities within Salesforce’s Customer 360 for Health. Of note on the data side, Salesforce debuted Patient Unified Health Scoring to provide insights into best courses of action for a given patient, integrated with the Patient Data Platform, allowing medical data to be appropriately connected while respecting HIPAA and other regulations and governance.

Snowflake Launches Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud

On March 17, Snowflake launched its Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud, aiming to eliminate data silos and allow for appropriate sharing and use of sensitive medical data while respecting regulations and governance. Key features include enhanced data governance, the ability to ingest and run analytics on HL7/FHIR messages, and support for analyzing numerous types of unstructured medical data.

Funding

Synthetaic Secures $13M Series A Financing

Synthetaic, an AI-based image classifier, has raised $13M in Series A funding. Lupa Systems led the round, with additional participation from Betaworks, Booz Allen Hamilton, Esri, and TitleTown Tech. The funding will be used for hiring, R+D, and strategic partnerships.

Product Launches and Updates

DataRobot AI Cloud 8.0 Now Available

On March 17, DataRobot debuted AI Cloud 8.0. Key enhancements include support for Automated Time Series in DataRobot’s AI App Builder, the availability of Continuous AI in on-prem environments, and new integrations with Microsoft Active Directory and Scoring Code for Snowflake. AI Cloud 8.0 is available now.

Dataiku Debuts Cloud Stack Accelerator on AWS

On March 16, Dataiku revealed their no-code cloud stack accelerator on AWS. The accelerator is a way to rapidly deploy and manage Dataiku on AWS, bringing together Amazon and Dataiku resources for machine learning projects. Notable capabilities in the partnership include the ability to connect, transform, and analyze datasets hosted on Amazon Redshift within Dataiku; build and scale Dataiku AutoML machine learning models running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service; and include computer vision and text analytics within Dataiku projects using AWS’ machine learning services.

Partnerships

Alteryx Updates Partner Program

Alteryx announced its updated partner program, marking a shift in its go-to-market strategy to emphasize the acceleration partners can provide in implementing analytics projects. Notable changes include three new tiers for partners (Registered, Select, and Premier), standardized benefits that increase with partner-initiated projects, a new role-based training curriculum and certifications, and global guidelines for engagement.

Databricks Introduces Brickbuilder Solutions, Extending Its Partner Program

Databricks established Brickbuilder Solutions, an extension of its partner program. Brickbuilder Solutions includes a number of consultants who have built solutions on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, helping their clients accelerate their data-driven digital transformation projects.

Tecton and Redis Integrate for Realtime Feature Store Access

Tecton, an enterprise feature store, and Redis, a realtime data platform, announced a partnership late last week. Tecton has integrated its feature store with Redis Enterprise Cloud to provide customers realtime feature serving for high-volume, low-latency use cases such as approving credit card transactions or fraud detection.

Hiring

Domino Data Lab Welcomes Former Microsoft Chief Data Analytics Officer John Kahan as Advisor

Domino Data Lab has welcomed John Kahan as a strategic advisor to their CEO and Board of Directors. Kahan will provide guidance on go-to-market and product development. Most recently, Kahan was the Chief Data Analytics Officer at Microsoft, where he held numerous roles in the data space over nearly the past two decades. Kahan also serves on several other companies’ boards and as an advisor to predictive analytics company Equinauts, petroleum and renewable energy company US Venture, and the Novartis Foundation to advise on AI in public health, intersecting with markets of interest to Domino.

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March 11: From BI to AI (Anodot, Appen, Atlan, Collibra, Databricks, Mindtech, Oracle, Snowflake, Vyasa, Xata)

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

Product Updates

Databricks Debuts Lakehouse for the Healthcare and Life Sciences Industries

On March 9, Databricks rolled out its latest industry-specific lakehouse, this time for healthcare and life sciences. Healthcare and life sciences data have particular issues around data silos and a lack of format standardization, along with the usual complications around combining structured and unstructured data for analysis, making it difficult to analyze said data at scale. Migrating data to a data lake such as Databricks’ Lakehouse will enable more complex and nuanced analysis of medical data, allowing for better understanding of patients, hospital capacity, disease spread, and other medical concepts. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park goes into further detail in TechTarget. Databricks Lakehouse for Healthcare and Life Sciences follows previous industry-specific lakehouse releases for Financial Services, and for Retail and Consumer Goods.

Collibra Extends Data Intelligence Cloud with New Capabilities

On March 9, Collibra, X, announced significant updates to its Data Intelligence Cloud. New capabilities include automatic validation rules in Collibra Data Quality and Observability to scale up enforcement of data quality and sensitive data discovery, new Data Quality workflows to prioritize data quality requests appropriately, automation of data curation for data stewards, and improved data visualization. In addition, considerable attention was given to integrations, with expanded support for Tableau and new support for Matillon, as well as a new browser extension providing context for data when viewing Tableau and PowerBI reports, among a number of other popular data sources.

Vyasa Launches Cortex for Visual Data Fabric Creation and Management

Vyasa, a deep learning and analytics software provider, debuted Cortex, a data fabric management platform, this week. Cortex functions as a template builder for data fabrics by allowing users to build, manage, and provision access to data sources that are connected to Vyasa’s Layar data fabrics, thus creating new data fabric instances. Data fabrics keep disparate data silos connected within a given project, and Layar uses deep learning to tag and catalog the data to enable easy search capabilities; Cortex then provides a business-user-friendly interface to manage the projects.

Funding

Atlan Raises $50M Series B

On March 9, Atlan, a data collaboration platform, announced that it had closed a $50M Series B funding round. Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital India co-led the round, with additional participation from Waterbridge Ventures and individual investors in the data space. The funding will go towards hiring throughout the company and expediting Atlan’s go-to-market strategy, as well as allowing for a potential ESOP buyback of up to $1.5M.

Xata Raises $30M to Launch a User-Friendly Serverless Database

Xata, a user-friendly serverless database service for developers, announced earlier this week that it had raised a $30M Series A round of financing from Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The funding will go towards product development. Xata also revealed that it had formed its board of directors, all women – an appropriate announcement for International Women’s Day on March 8. The board consists of CEO and Xata founder Monica Sarbu, Redpoint’s Erica Brescia as the director of the board, and Index’s Erin Price-Wright as a board observer.

Oracle Announces Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Financial Results

On March 10, Oracle announced its Q3 2022 fiscal results. Revenues matched expectations, but earnings came in slightly below expectations. One potential contributing factor is that two of Oracle’s investments are underperforming – chip maker Ampere Computing had an operating loss, and gene sequencing company Oxford Nanopore has seen its stock price cut in half since the beginning of the year. These actually highlight two key trends. First, with the ongoing supply chain issues, large tech companies want to have more control over their ability to make and sell relevant hardware going forward, and recent geopolitical issues will exacerbate this trend further. Second, in addition to investing heavily enough in Oxford Nanopore that it affected their bottom line, Oracle also announced its intention to buy health record management software company Cerner for $28B. IBM may be getting out of healthcare, but Oracle seems eager to jump into the fray.

Partnerships

Appen Partners with, Invests in Synthetic Data Business Mindtech

On March 10, Appen, a data annotation platform, and Mindtech, a computer vision-centric synthetic data creation platform, announced a commercial partnership between the two companies. Appen and Mindtech will provide both real and synthetic images, along with contextualized data and metadata annotation services, to encourage adoption of synthetic data in training AI models. As part of the investipartnership, Appen has also invested $3.7M to accelerate Mindtech’s growth.

Anodot Partners with Snowflake’s Data Cloud

On March 7, Anodot announced that it had joined the Snowflake Partner Network. Anodot provides anomaly detection and alerting, specializing in time series data. Joint customers of Anodot and Snowflake will be able to monitor this high-volume, high-frequency data collected in Snowflake for near-real-time insights.

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March 4: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Databricks, Datametica, Dremio, Informatica, KX, Microsoft, Snowflake, Stardog, Streamlit)

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

Funding and Financials

Snowflake Reports Q4 and 2022 Fiscal Year Financial Results

Snowflake announced their full-year and Q4 financial results this week. Product revenue was nearly $360M in Q4, representing 102% year-over-year growth, while for the full year, product revenue was over $1.1B at 106% growth YOY. Despite more than doubling revenues, Snowflake’s stock plunged nearly 15% following this announcement because this level of revenue growth failed to meet market expectations.

Amalgam’s Insight: Snowflake’s expectations for growth are so high that it can grow at nearly unprecedented rates and still “lose value” from a stock perspective. In considering Snowflake’s financial viability in the solution selection process, look at Snowflake’s raw financials metrics, which bascially show that the company is doubling year over year at a 65% gross margin, rather than the fluctuations of its stock price.

Product Launches and Enhancements

Alteryx Announces Alteryx Analytics Cloud

On March 1, Alteryx debuted the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, unifying Alteryx Designer Cloud and Alteryx Machine Learning with its recent acquisitions of Trifacta Data Engineering and Hyper Anna, now called Alteryx Auto Insights. Alteryx users will now have access to the full Analytics Cloud suite via a web browser in addition to the existing Desktop and on-prem solutions.

Amalgam’s Insight: The Analytics Cloud provides a comprehensive packaging option for potential Alteryx customers to purchase all of Alteryx’s major capabilities. This suite also provides companies with a toolkit to support both data analysts and data scientists across the cleansing, modeling, automation, and insight-related activities  associated with machine learning as Alteryx continues to expand its role in the enterprise data, analytics, and machine learning world.

Dremio Debuts Dremio Cloud on AWS, Along With Additional Services

Dremio released Dremio Cloud, a free data lakehouse platform, this week on AWS, along with two new services: Dremio Sonar and Dremio Arctic. Dremio Sonar allows companies to run BI directly on lakehouse data without needing to export it anywhere, while Dremio Arctic, a metadata and data management service for Apache Iceberg, allows users to “version” data workflows the way software developers version source code. Dremio Cloud and Dremio Sonar are both generally available now, while Dremio Arctic is in public preview.

Amalgam’s Insight: Dremio is making good on its recent $160 million round of funding with new product capabilities at a time when the concept of the lakehouse, an analytic layer designed to support semi-structured data, is becoming mandatory in enterprise environments. Given the vast amounts of money being spent in the innovation and go-to-market strategies in this market, Amalgam Insights believes it is a market trend for lakehouse vendors to compete on freemium, managed services, and governance options that make the lakehouse cheaper, easier, and safer to deploy.

Informatica Introduces Intelligent Multi-Domain Master Data Management

On March 2, Informatica announced that they have added Intelligent Multi-Domain Master Data Management capabilities to their Intelligent Data Management Cloud, allowing customers to view and manage master data across multiple domains in a relational manner.

Amalgam’s Insights: Informatica continues to build on its market leadership in Master Data Management at a time when hybrid and multi-cloud management as well as regionalized data governance statutes make it increasingly difficult to rationalize master data at a multinational enterprise level. 

Stardog Reveals Stardog Designer in Latest Version

Stardog released version 7.9.0 of its platform, and revealed Stardog Designer, a no-code knowledge graph creation application within the platform. Stardog users will be able to create semantic data models using a visual interface, then easily export those models to flat files or to other apps within Stardog.

Amalgam’s Insight: Graph data provides one of the highest ROI use cases for enterprise analytics, but one of the biggest challenges to adoption has been the lack of internal skills associated with creating, managing, and analyzing the nodes and vertices that make up an enterprise graph. Stardog’s release provides companies with an opportunity to both build relevant graph models and to export the context and shape of these models to other applications as necessary. 

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Datametica Forms Strategic Partnership with Databricks

Datametica, a data migration company, has partnered with Databricks. Datametica customers will now be able to use the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to modernize their data warehouses and migrate them to the cloud. For Databricks, this provides yet another route for customers with on-prem data warehouses to more easily migrate said data sources to the cloud.

Amalgam’s Insight: Datametica’s experience has traditionally been in migrating data warehouses to Google BigQuery and Microsoft Azure. This partnership makes it easier to migrate more data into Databricks at a time when the lakehouse approach to enterprise data continues to gain popularity. Databricks already has over $800 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $1.6 billion H round in August of 2021

KX Enters Strategic Partnership Agreement with Microsoft Azure

FD Technologies has partnered with Microsoft to extend the reach of FD Technologies’ KX Insights streaming data analytics platform. KX Insights will be embedded into Microsoft Azure, and KX and Microsoft will work together to develop new applications and services for the financial services sector.

Amalgam’s Insight: The financial services sector is a target for all of the major cloud vendors, as this sector is highly dependent on technological performance to gain advantages. This partnership shows yet another example of a third-party solution running on Azure that competes against an Azure product (Azure Stream Analytics) with the understanding that the most important goal is to win in the sector rather than to maximize short-term deal size.

Snowflake Announces Intent to Acquire Streamlit to Empower Developers and Data Scientists to Mobilize the World’s Data – Snowflake

On March 2, Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Streamlit, an open-source data application creation platform. Streamlit users can already build data apps without needing front-end development expertise; with the Snowflake acquisition, access to trusted data will be easier. Snowflake users will in turn have access to a user-friendly app development platform.

Amalgam’s Insight: Snowflake has sold a vision to the public markets of being a one-stop shop for all things data and analytics. This $800 million investment in Streamlit provides Snowflake with a scalable rapid development platform to expose more Snowflake data to more users. Usability is a core competitive aspect of data, which includes visualization, natural language queries, machine learning, contextualized apps, and embedded analytics. This investment cost approximately 1% of Snowflake’s market capitalization, making it relatively easy to justify. 

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February 25: From BI to AI (Aporia, cnvrg.io, Decodable, Equalum, Grata, Hasura, Mage, nRoad, Redpanda, SeMI Technologies, thatDot)

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

Funding

Aporia Raises $25 Million to Grow its Machine Learning Observability Platform

On February 22, Aporia, a machine learning observability platform, announced that it had raised $25M in a Series A funding round. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures, and new investors Samsung NEXT and Tal Ventures. The funding will go towards hiring and global expansion.

Decodable Raises $20M Series A Funding Round For Its Realtime Data Platform

Decodable, a realtime data engineering platform, raised a $20M A round this week. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock led the funding round, with additional participation from individual investors including former US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, DataDog CEO Olivier Pomel, Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, and Redis CRO and President Jason Forget. Decodable also debuted the Decodable Real-Time Data Platform, which supports functions like event-driven micro services, data mesh deployment, realtime data integration and ML/AI pipelines, and data governance and regulatory compliance.

Grata Closes $25 Million A Round For Its Data Intelligence Engine

Grata, a data intelligence engine, announced February 22 that it had raised $25M in a Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures. Existing investors Accomplice, Bling, and Touchdown Ventures also participated, along with new investors Altai Ventures, Eigen Ventures, and Teamworthy Ventures. The funding will go towards further product development. Grata uses proprietary machine learning and natural language processing models to process unstructured data from websites into insights on private companies, made available in a search-based interface.

GraphQL Engine Provider Hasura Announces $100M in Series C Funding

Hasura, a GraphQL engine provider, has raised a $100M Series C funding round. Greenoaks led the round, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures. Hasura will use the funding for R+D and global expansion of their go-to-market strategy.

Streaming Data Platform Redpanda Raises $50M Series B

Redpanda, a data streaming platform, announced February 23 that they had raised a $50M Series B Funding Round led by GV. Haystack VC also participated, as did Lightspeed Venture Partners (busy week for Lightspeed, also participating in the Hasura C round!). The funding will go towards hiring for their engineering and go-to-market teams.

SeMI Technologies Raises $16M Series A Round For AI-Based Search Database

SeMI Technologies, providers of open source vector search engine Weaviate, announced a $16M Series A funding round February 22. Cortical Ventures and New Enterprise Associates co-led the round. The funding will go towards hiring, community development, and product improvement including increasing potential use cases and creating and improving the ML models Weaviate is based on.

Launches and Updates

cnvrg.io Announces AI Blueprints, Customizable ML Pipelines

On February 22, Cnvrg.io, an AI/ML platform provider, debuted cnvrg.io AI Blueprints. AI Blueprints is a curated open-source library of machine learning model APIs and customizable pipelines, allowing companies to quickly piece together models to analyze their data. Availability of cnvrg.io AI Blueprints is planned for the first half of 2022.

Equalum Releases v3.0 of their Continuous Data Integration Platform 3.0

Equalum released version 3.0 of their “continuous” data integration platform this week. New features include expanded support for cloud targets across AWS, Azure, and GCP; enhanced binary parsers for Oracle logs and SQL replication; improvements to replication groups to allow for extensive data migrations and cross-platform data warehousing; and no-code data integration capabilities for streaming ETL and ELT data, as well as batch ETL and change data capture.

Mage Debuts Low Code AI Ranking Model Tool for Product Developers

On February 24, Mage announced the general availability of its low code AI tool. Mage is targeted towards product developers needing to build AI ranking models to increase user engagement and retention.

nRoad Launches Unstructured Data Processing Platform Convus

nRoad, an NLP startup, introduced its Convus platform February 23. Convus provides machine learning models for financial services to extract insights from unstructured data. This allows FinTech businesses to avoid manual data extraction and entry while incorporating information in documents into business processes.

thatDot Releases Complex Event Processing Engine Quine Streaming Graph

thatDot, complex event processing software providers, debuted Quine Streaming Graph, an open source event processing engine based on streaming graph data. Developers can use Quine to quickly build complex event processing workflows to apply to streaming graph data using “recipes.” Recipes currently available include blockchain realtime tag propagation, CDN cache efficiency analysis, and Apache server log observability.

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Russia Invades Ukraine: 5 Considerations for the IT Community

As anyone who has checked the news today is aware, Russia invaded Ukraine early this morning as the United Nations was holding an emergency meeting seeking to persuade Russia not to invade. The initial results have included stunning pictures of Russian military vehicles and missiles entering Ukraine, the Moscow Stock Exchange falling over 30% in one day, and new international sanctions.

Although the subtleties of geopolitical complexity, NATO, the historical Russian Empire, Ukranian governmental changes, European oil and gas supplies, and nuclear arms are far far far beyond the scope of what we cover at Amalgam Insights, we absolutely hope for a quick and peaceful end to this attack.

In the meantime, we live in a global economy and there are specific aspects of this invasion that specifically affects the IT world.

First, plan for potential delays in software development. Ukraine had established itself as an important nearshore and offshore application development source with over 200,000 skilled developers. Many top software companies and enterprises employ developers from Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. With this invasion, developers are either moving west to Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lutsk or into Poland or being conscripted into defense forces. From a practical perspective, this is going to delay development of new versions and features. Check up with your key vendors to see whether there are expected delays based on this issue. Obviously, there is no feature more important than these lives; this is just about being able to manage expectations and to keep in touch with the people who are building the tools you use at work.

Second, check up on cybersecurity. With current sanctions and financial access locked down, Russia will be looking for liquid funds by any ways necessary. This includes ransomware, accessing computing for cryptomining, and using remote computing to mask trails to access other digital assets. This is a good time to update your patches and passwords and to be diligent on social engineering schemes designed to get employees to click through or give away passwords on the phone. Clicking unknown links is always bad, but this is an especially good time to be paranoid about updates even from trusted vendors and suppliers.

Third, keep your cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) safe. Crypto has been an enabler for black market activity because of its nature as a relatively liquid asset that is relatively easy to transfer. Make sure that any digital assets you or your organization have are backed up on a well-governed store such as ClubNFT. And make sure your crypto is safe on a wallet you own.

Fourth, budget for cloud costs to increase quickly over the rest of the year as the cost of computing increase. Russia and Ukraine are the primary producers and purifiers of the noble gas neon, which is used to etch semiconductors from 180 to 1X nm nodes, which make up roughly 75% of the total market. Ukraine provides 90% of the world’s supply of purified neon, with Iceblick alone estimated to provide over 60% of the world’s neon. As strategic Ukrainian targets are attacked, the supply of neon will decrease in the short term making chip prices go up. Even if Russia manages to create its own purification capacity, sanctions will make neon extremely expensive. As an example, when Ukraine was initially invaded in 2014, neon prices went up 6x.

Fifth, expect a flood of disinformation across all areas. Modern war is conducted not only as a military exercise, but as a financial, digital, informational, and political exercise. There are aspects of information that Putin and the Russian government are interested in controlling for their own specific reasons that can lead to non-factual announcements. This is going to be, in technical terms, “a pain in the ass” to manage as fact checking becomes more important. This may include disinformation around cybersecurity, healthcare, politics, or any other number of areas with the goal of providing distractions. As a key ally of Ukraine and a core member of NATO, the United States will likely be a target of the social rumor mill in a variety of ways. Ironically, I’ll use a Russian proverb for this recommendation: Доверяй, но проверяй (Doveryay, no proveryay – Trust, but verify).

And, obviously, make sure that your organization is not dependent on Russian computing and financial resources as the risk that those resources will be cut off from the rest of the world is unfortunately real as the escalation of cyber and financial conflict increases.

This invasion is a sad and worrisome time for the world. In our roles as technologists and IT shepherds, there is only so much we can do. But it is up to us to make sure that the assets and services that we manage are kept safe and in control in challenging times. Stay safe and keep your organization as safe as possible.

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February 18: From BI to AI (Arcion, Atakama, BigID, Dataiku, H20.ai, HPE, Kyligence, Informatica, Striim, Sway AI)

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

Funding and Financial

Arcion, Formerly Blitzz, Secures $13M Series A To Transform Data Infrastructure

Arcion, a data mobility platform, secured a series A funding round of $13M. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Databricks. Bessemer VP Sakib Dadi joined the board of directors as part of the process. The funding is likely to go towards building both the product and team. Arcion also brought on board CEO Gary Hagmueller from an EIR position at Redpoint Ventures. Prior to that, Hagmueller was the CEO at Dgraph Labs, the President and CEO at Clara Analytics, and spent most of a decade at Ayasdi as first CFO, then as COO.

Amalgam’s Insight: Cloud data pipelines continue to be both an important enabler for conducting analytics at scale and a capability that is still difficult to operationalize and automate. This funding round is part of a continuing wave of investment focused on improving access to large stores of data. In addition, Hagmueller’s experience in productizing previously unmanageable data challenges is a noted strength that will prove to be useful for Arcion.

Informatica Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2021 Financial Results

Enterprise cloud data management company Informatica reported its Q4 and 2021 financial results this week. While revenue was up, particularly subscription revenue – a known target as they move customers to the cloud and onto subscription plans – Informatica missed on earnings, and had a rough ride in the stock market this week.

Amalgam’s Insight: Tech vendors often go private as they are converting to the cloud exactly because public markets overreact to very tactical margin changes and struggle to value long-term business changes correctly. This happens time and time again where financial markets misread vendors, then suddenly wake up to see the results when a vendor beats expectations. There is no real fundamental difference between Informatica currently at $20 per share vs. when it was at $38 per share two months ago other than external geopolitical and economic forces as well as that Informatica is farther along in its progression towards migrating clients towards the cloud. At this point, Informatica is currently valued similarly to Fivetran which is an interesting comparison when one looks at the revenue of these two companies.

Product Launches and Enhancements

H2O.ai Democratizes Deep Learning with H2O Hydrogen Torch

H2O.ai, an AI cloud company, debuted H2O Hydrogen Torch, a no-code deep learning training engine. Hydrogen Torch is focused on making image, video, and natural language processing models with deep learning via a code-free interface, dealing with unstructured data that companies have not generally been able to analyze sufficiently to derive value from.

Amalgam’s Insight: Enterprises have the ability to analyze images and videos to support a wide variety of customer service, logistics, sales, and marketing use cases but still struggle to build models off these quirky and unstructured data sources that are often larger than the entirety of the structured data that is currently being managed. H2O Hydrogen Torch should prove to be a valuable solution for companies seeking to translate media libraries into business value.

Kyligence’s Intelligent Data Cloud Platform Now Available on Google Cloud

Kyligence, a data services and management platform provider, announced that its data cloud platform Kyligence Cloud was now available in beta on Google Cloud. Kyligence Cloud is a big data OLAP solution, providing high-performance analytic capability in a cloud-native environment while allowing analysts and business users to connect to it with familiar tools.

Amalgam’s Insight: Moving structured and performant data into the cloud continues to be important, but this announcement also demonstrates the continued progression of Google Cloud as a location for analytic data to reside. Google continues to gain access to high performance analytic data as both startups and enterprises see it as a cost-effective and user-interface friendly solution for data.

Sway AI Announces Its No-Code Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform

On February 15, Sway AI announced its no-code AI platform, targeted at both technical and business users. Sway AI’s focus is on allowing enterprises to build and deploy AI without needing to invest heavily in expensive hiring or complex toolkits upfront.

Amalgam’s Insight: This announcement hits many of the buzzwords businesses are hearing for model building: AI, no-code, business-friendly, rapid deployment. But beyond this hype, the critical challenge here is in helping the people who understand business data best to create relevant models.

Partnerships

Striim and Hewlett Packard Enterprise partner to offer high performance, mission-critical solutions with real-time analytics

Striim, a real-time data integration platform, announced a partnership with HPE in the form of Striim for HPE NonStop, a high-performance distributed data transaction solution that allows organizations to analyze streaming data for business insights.

Amalgam’s Insight: Streaming data is reaching mainstream visibility as the need for immediate analysis continues to grow. HPE has another tool to help sell its high-performance hardware while Striim gains another channel with a sales team with a strong solutions selling background.

BigID + Atakama: Data-Centric File Encryption | BigID

BigID, a data intelligence platform, announced a partnership with Atakama, an encryption company. From this partnership, Atakama is building a solution on the BigID platform that will read BigID’s data labeling and tagging, and automatically encrypt files based on the sensitivity of the data contained within.

Amalgam’s Insight: Data identity and trust are massive themes driving new markets associated with blockchain, NFT’s, and the general Web3 experience. But practical aspects of data trust and governance are still formidable challenges for the enterprise, including metadata management and data governance. This partnership helps bring more order to the chaos of existing Big Data environments.

Hiring

Dataiku Announces Edward Bush as Chief Operating Officer to Support Rapid Growth and Bolster Employee Experience

On February 16, Dataiku announced the elevation of Edward Bush as Chief Operating Officer. Bush joined Dataiku in 2017 as the VP of Finance. Prior to Dataiku, Bush was the VP of Finance and Business Operations at VTS.

Amalgam’s Insight: This promotion occurs soon after Dataiku upgraded its board with former Tableau CMO Elissa Fink and former Mimecast CFO Peter Campbell as well as a $400 million funding round. This serves as a strong vote of confidence in Bush to support the employee culture as Dataiku pushes for its next order-of-magnitude growth push.

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February 11: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Census, DvSum, Qwak, ScaleUp:AI, Scandit, Starburst, Superconductive, Trifacta, Wallaroo, ZL Tech)

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

Acquisitions

Alteryx Closes Acquisition of Trifacta | Alteryx

On February 7, Alteryx announced that it had closed its acquisition of Trifacta, as noted in the January 7 From BI to AI. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park provided recommendations and insights on Alteryx’ acquisition of Trifacta earlier this week.

Funding

Starburst Raises $250 Million to Lead the Market Shift to Faster Analytics on Decentralized Data | Starburst

Starburst, a data mesh analytics company, announced at its Datanova conference this week that it had raised a $250M Series D funding round. Alkeon Capital led the round, with participation from new investors Altimeter and B Capital Group as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

Amalgam’s Insight: One of the top challenges of this decade is in accelerating time-to-value on scattered and distributed data. The race to both develop this market and achieve market leadership is occurring quickly and Starburst’s focus on distributed query provides a flexible approach to consider.

Scandit, the Smart Data Capture Leader, Announces $150m Series D Investment Led by Warburg Pincus – Scandit

Scandit, a computer vision-based edge data capture company, announced on February 9 that it had completed a Series D funding round of $150M. Warburg Pincus led the round, with additional participation from existing investors Atomico, Forestay Capital, G2VP, GV, Kreos, NGP Capital, Schneider Electric, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV and Swisscom Ventures. The funding will go towards continuing Scandit’s global expansion, with a particular focus on APAC, specifically Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

Amalgam’s Insight: Visual data such as barcodes, QR codes, and text continue to provide valuable capabilities in supporting the On-Demand economy. The ability to translate visual data into workflows, documentation, and transactions based on a single scan is still maturing and Scandit’s new round of funding will allow it to support e-commerce, support, and logistics challenges in the APAC region.

$60m to make operational analytics a reality | Census

Census, a business-user targeted data layer, has raised $60M in a Series B round led by Tiger. Previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and new investor Insight Partners also participated in the round. The funding will go towards expanding the product, including adding more data connectors to their library, adding new CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) features, and building governance into their platform via a business-wide knowledge graph.

Amalgam’s Insight: Although $60 million is not a huge amount for the likes of Tiger Global, A16z, Sequoia, and Insight Partners, it is notable that four of the biggest venture capital firms with a data background saw the value of Census to enable business knowledge graphs. The holy grail of the business graph has been a goal for over a decade since the days that “Social Business” was still a buzzword. However, it has been difficult in practice to translate the vision of a fully interconnected data graph within the business into a reality. If this round goes as planned, don’t be surprised to see Census become a unicorn startup in the next couple of years.

Superconductive Raises $40M in Series B Funding to Revolutionize the Speed and Integrity of Data Collaboration

Superconductive, the provider of open source data quality tool Great Expectations, has raised a $40M Series B round. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from CRV, Index, and Root Ventures. The funds will be used for R+D towards releasing their first commercial product, as well as growing the organization through hiring.

Amalgam’s Insight: One of the new key phrases in today’s world of machine learning is that analytic and machine learning models are only as good as the data they are based on. Superconductive seeks to create a more collaborative experience to create better data pipelines so that all relevant data experts and developers can do their part to keep data clean.

Machine Learning Innovator Wallaroo Wins Backing from Microsoft’s M12 in $25M Series A Round | Business Wire

Wallaroo, a machine learning operationalization company, has closed a $25M Series A round of funding. M12, Microsoft’s venture arm, led the round, along with participation from existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Eniac Ventures, and Greycroft, as well as new investors NSS Advisors and Ridgeline Partners. Wallaroo will use the funds to both improve their existing product and release a free version, as well as grow sales and marketing.

Amalgam’s Insight: Wallaroo seeks to reduce the cost of operationalizing machine learning. This has obvious repercussions for Microsoft, which is in a race with Amazon and Google to put as many demanding workloads onto its cloud as soon as possible. Wallaroo’s claims of reducing time to production by over 90% should prove to be valuable in getting more models into production.

Qwak looks to automate MLOps processes | VentureBeat

MLOps company Qwak raised $15M in a Series A round, joining a number of companies eager to help companies operationalize their machine learning models. New investors include Leaders Fund and StageOne Ventures, while previous investor Amiti Ventures and individual investors also participated. The funds will go towards product development, as well as expanding sales and marketing.

Amalgam’s Insight: The pain point of animal-named companies getting models into production is a continuing theme those week. Qwak seeks to be a holistic machine learning engineering solution with its goal of being a destination for data scientists to build, test, and deploy models within a single platform and its claims of being able to get a model from script to production in less than five minutes.

Product Launches and Updates

Starburst Unveils New Data Product Functionality to Accelerate Data Mesh Journey | Starburst

Starburst also announced new capabilities for its Starburst Enterprise product at Datanova. New and improved features include access control to secure data products for consistent governance, the ability for data engineers and producers to define relevant metadata in said data products, and rating and sharing of said data products to make data accessible as quickly as possible.

Amalgam’s Insight: The battle for context continues to be a massive challenge and Starburst’s additions of data governance and metadata definitions align to the need for business users to trust the data that they are providing to their customers.

ZL Tech Introduces New Solution to Transform Out-of-Sight Corporate Knowledge to Business Insight – ZL Tech

On February 8, ZL Tech announced improvements to ZL People Analytics, its SaaS solution for unstructured information management. Instead of being confined to a “sandboxed” structured database, ZL People Analytics includes unstructured data such email, documents, and company chat in its purview while allowing that data to remain in-place to address governance and regulatory concerns, making the data search process more efficient.

Amalgam’s Insight: Text analytics can be both cumbersome to support and provide governance nightmares as GDPR, CCPA, and other personal information management laws have become standard practice. By supporting analytics on top of semi-structured and unstructured data, this offering helps companies to get more information while keeping data centralized and in-location.

DvSum Launches its Next Generation Data Catalog | Business Wire

On February 7, DvSum debuted its augmented data catalog solution. Key features include automatic cataloging, classification, and curation of data, as well as recommending new entities and business terms for an organization’s business glossary. There is a free tier available; premium plans based on the number of data sources and users start at $1k/month.

Amalgam’s Insight: The data catalog has become an important part of the data manager’s toolkit in defining the business view of the world. However, data curation is still a relatively expensive endeavor and DvSum is seeking to provide context while maintaining a cost-efficient offering.

Events

April 6-7, 2022: ScaleUp AI

On April 6 and 7, Insight Partners will host ScaleUp:AI, an AI industry conference, in New York and virtually. Confirmed speakers include Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi; Allie K. Miller, Global Head of Machine Learning Business Development, Startups, and Venture Capital at AWS; Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng; Humana Chief Digital Health and Analytics Officer Heather Carroll Cox; Fiddler AI CEO Krishna Gabe; and SentinelOne CEO and cofounder Tomer Weingarten. The in-person event is sold out, but virtual passes are still available; register for the event at ScaleUp:AI.