Category: Data Science

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.

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.

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.

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

Funding

Our Opportunity to Build Something Even Bigger: Series C Funding Announcement – Pecan AI

On February 3, Pecan, a low-code predictive analytics platform, raised $66M in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the round, with new investor GV also participating, as well as existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, GGV Capital, Mindset Ventures, S-Capital, and Vintage Investment Partners. The funding will be used to accelerate R+D and increase headcount.

Amalgam’s Insight: Pecan epitomizes the idea of helping companies move from BI to AI with its capability to help SQL-savvy data analysts to conduct data science. As a bridge technology between BI and AI, Pecan’s approach to providing predictive models for general use is a capability enterprises will need to pursue (whether with Pecan or another vendor) to empower their data analysts for the emerging era of machine learning that has been in progress for the last half-decade.

Onehouse Supercharges Data Lakes for AI and Machine Learning With $8 Million in Seed Funding From Greylock and Addition

On February 2, Onehouse, a lakehouse service built atop Apache Hudi to make data lakes faster, cheaper, and easier to access, emerged from stealth with $8M in seed funding. Investment firms Greylock and Addition co-led the funding round; the money will be used for R+D. Onehouse is fully managed and cloud-native, accelerating the speed at which data lakes can be set up. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park is quoted in the press release announcing the launch of Onehouse.

Amalgam’s Insight: The lakehouse, an amalgamation of data lake and data warehouse, is an important construct for data architects seeking to unlock the value of the “Big Data” they have collected over the past decade. The overwhelming volume and variety of enterprise data makes a traditional data warehouse approach challenging to support for all relevant data. However, lakehouses are challenging to support and Onehouse’s approach of providing a managed service for lakehouses will be valuable for companies seeking to take this approach but lacking the personnel to access the analytic value of semi-structured data.

Acquisitions

Idera, Inc. Acquires Yellowfin International Pty Ltd

On January 28, Idera announced that they had acquired Yellowfin International, an embedded data analytics and BI platform. Yellowfin will join Idera’s Developer Tools business, expanding the capabilities of that suite in a new direction, enhancing the ability of Idera to cross-sell BI and analytics functionality to existing and new customers.

Amalgam’s Insight: Yellowfin has been a long-time favorite of Amalgam Insights with its market-leading visualization and user-focused data exploration capabilities combined with its extreme scalability. In joining Idera, Yellowfin now joins a suite of solutions that will enhance Yellowfin’s embedded business intelligence capabilities and provide developers with tools for more robust and user-friendly applications.

Teradata Announces Global Partnership with Microsoft

On February 2, Teradata announced a global partnership with Microsoft where it would more fully integrate the Teradata Vantage platform with Microsoft Azure. Though Teradata is already significantly integrated with over 60 existing Azure data services, this announcement signals a deepening of the existing relationship between the two companies.

Amalgam’s Insight: This partnership shows Microsoft Azure’s continued partnership with analytic and data companies that compete with other areas of Microsoft. For Teradata, this partnership helps current clients to migrate to an enterprise cloud that is developer-friendly while Microsoft gains more data as it competes against Amazon in the cloud infrastructure market.

Citrix to be Acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital for $16.5 Billion | TIBCO Software

On January 31, Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation announced that they would be acquiring Citrix, a digital workspace and application delivery platform, for $16.5B. As part of the transaction, Citrix will merge with TIBCO, which is currently owned by Vista, bringing together Citrix’s secure digital workspace and app delivery capabilities with TIBCO’s data and analytics under one roof, with the goal of accelerating Citrix’s SaaS transition while creating a company that serves 98% of the Fortune 500.

Amalgam’s Insight: We will be working on a deeper exploration of this acquisition, which at first glance mirrors Idera’s acquisition of Yellowfin in creating a larger enterprise application company with a variety of capabilities across data management, security, and IT management. Given that Vista Equity Partners acquired TIBCO in 2014 for $4.3 billion, this will provide to be a busy year for TIBCO in quickly integrating Citrix and presenting this combined company for an impending acquisition or IPO.

Updates and Launches

Alteryx introduces the newest version of the Alteryx Platform (2021.4)

Alteryx launched the latest version of the Alteryx Platform, 2021.4, on February 3. Key improvements include enhanced server APIs to allow for further administrative automation; the Named Entity Recognition text mining tool which automatically extracts data from images; new connectors for Anaplan, Google Drive, Outlook 365, and Automation Anywhere; and the Data Connection Manager, which will simplify sharing data sources across an organization.

Amalgam’s Insight: Alteryx’s market leadership as an analytic workflow platform is enhanced with this combination of connectors, data sharing, and automation capabilities. This version update comes at a time when Alteryx’s next stage of growth is dependent on supporting enterprise-wide use cases for analytic insight and providing the administrative governance necessary to quickly deploy these use cases.

Informatica Announces New PoD in UK to Support Growing Demand for Data Sovereignty | Informatica

On February 3, Informatica announced a new UK Point of Delivery for its Intelligent Data Management Cloud. Brexit has complicated the understanding and enforcement of data privacy and locality requirements, especially in regulated industries.

Amalgam’s Insight: Informatica’s debuting a geographically appropriate cloud to support organizations doing business in the UK helps said orgs respect relevant data-related laws and regulations. This delivery site will continue to be a trend in the data industry where global organizations will need to increase their investment in the UK or risk losing business to better-prepared competitors.

Hiring

Alteryx Announces Leadership Changes to Accelerate Next Phase of Cloud Growth | Alteryx

On February 1, Alteryx announced several personnel changes. Paula Hansen has been promoted to President and Chief Revenue Officer, while Keith Pearce has been named as the company’s new CMO. Previously, Pearce was the SVP of Corporate Marketing for Genesys. In addition, COO Scott Davidson will step down from his role as of mid-March.

Amalgam’s Insight: We covered the hiring of Paula Hansen in our May 2021 update. This promotion made sense as Alteryx has had a President/Chief Revenue Officer in the past. Keith Pearce has a strong record of solutions and vertical marketing across his career which fits Alteryx’ need to dig further into each vertical now that it has reached a critical mass of accounts. Alteryx’ challenge is no longer name recognition, but account development and education: two areas where Pearce has excelled in his past roles.

DataRobot Hires Google’s Debanjan Saha as Chief Operating Officer – DataRobot AI Cloud

On February 2, DataRobot welcomed Debanjan Saha as their new Chief Operating Officer. Saha was previously the VP and GM of Data Analytics at Google, overseeing analytics on Google Cloud and BigQuery; before that, Saha developed and launched the Amazon Aurora relational database at AWS.

Amalgam’s Insight: Saha has a long record of managing cutting-edge cloud solutions at IBM, Amazon, and Google across virtualization, database, and data management technologies. As DataRobot has quickly grown from a machine learning automation solution to a broader MLOps and engineering platform, Saha’s managerial background will be valuable in pushing DataRobot’s development and monetization of the end-to-end needs for enterprise machine learning.

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

Funding

Dremio Doubles Valuation to $2 Billion with $160M Investment Towards Reinventing SQL for Data Lakes – Dremio

On January 25, Dremio announced that it had raised $160M in a Series E funding round. This new round comes only a year after a $135M Series D round from last January 2021. Adams Street Partners led the funding round, joined by fellow new investors DTCP and StepStone Group. Existing investor participation came from Cisco Investments, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures. The funding will go towards R+D, customer service, customer education and community-building, and contributions to open source initiatives. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park was quoted in TechTarget on the Dremio investment: Dremio raises $160M for cloud data lake platform technology.

Firebolt Announces Series C Round at $1.4 billion Valuation

On January 26, Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse, announced a $100M Series C round. Aikeon Capital led the round, with participation from new investors Glynn Capital and Sozo Ventures, and existing investors Angular Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dawn Capital, K5 Global, TLV Partners, and Zeev Ventures. The funds will primarily go towards expanding the product and engineering teams. Firebolt also announced that Mosha Pasumansky would assume the CTO position, coming over from Google BigQuery, and that Firebolt would be opening a Seattle office.

anch.AI, former AI Sustainability Center, Secures $2.1M in Seed Funding to Launch Ethical AI Governance Platform

On January 26, anch.AI launched its ethical AI governance platform, and secured $2.1M in seed funding. Benhamou Global Ventures led the round, with participation from Terrain Invest, Frederik Andersson, Kent Janer, and Magnus Rausing. The funding will go towards further development of the platform.

Updates and Enhancements

Domino Data Lab Unveils Platform to Accelerate Model Velocity

On January 26, Domino Data Lab debuted Domino 5.0., a major new release of their MLOps platform. Key new capabilities include autoscaling clusters to give data science teams easier access to compute infra; data collectors that will allow teams to securely share and reuse common data access patterns; and integrated monitoring of models in production, with automated insights that compare production data to training data to assess and diagnose model drift. The latest version is available immediately to existing Domino customers, with a trial version available for new customers.

Dataiku Achieves ISO 27001 Certification | Dataiku

On January 27, Dataiku announced that they were now ISO 27001 certified, citing it as a “business imperative” to protect sensitive customer data from improper access and security breaches. ISO 27001 certification is a consideration for enterprises needing to not only prevent security breaches, but also ensure data is appropriately domiciled to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

DataRobot Launches MoreIntelligent.ai to Share Untold Stories on the Future of AI – DataRobot AI Cloud

DataRobot continues its AI education efforts with this week’s launch of MoreIntelligent.ai, an expansion of their More Intelligent Tomorrow podcast. Content will include research and analysis, prescriptive takeaways to inform AI practitioner action, and interviews with prominent AI leaders. The prominence DataRobot is giving More Intelligent works suggests that education about AI continues to be key to growing the AI market.

Introducing Meta’s Next-Gen AI Supercomputer | Meta

On January 24, Meta unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster, aiming to be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it’s completed in mid-2022. Meta plans to use the RSC to build stronger AI models which will analyze text, images, and video together in hundreds of languages, as a step on the path towards the metaverse.

Hiring

Informatica Appoints Jim Kruger as Chief Marketing Officer to Accelerate Cloud Growth | Informatica

On January 24, Informatica appointed Jim Kruger as the Chief Marketing Officer. Kruger was previously the CMO at Veeam Software, Intermedia, and Polycom, bringing years of experience in the CMO role as an experienced marketer who understands how to communicate around complex technologies.

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

Funding

Prophecy raises Series A to Industrialize Data Refining

Prophecy, a low-code data engineering platform, raised $25M in Series A funding this week. The round was led by Insight Partners, with other participants from existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck and SignalFire, and new investor Dig Ventures. The funding will go towards building out the platform, as well as investing in the go-to-market side. Prophecy seeks to standardize data refinement for use at scale, making the process more predictable and visible.

Vectice Announces $15.6M in Seed and Series A Funding

On January 18, Vectice, a data science knowledge capture company, announced it had raised a $12.6M series A round. The round was co-led by Crosslink Capital and Sorenson Ventures. Additional participants included Global Founders Capital (GFC), Silicon Valley Bank, and Spider Capital. Vectice will use the funds to further expand its team, and to onboard select accounts into their Beta program. Vectice automatically captures the assets that data science teams generate throughout a project, and generates documentation throughout the project lifecycle.

Diversio Announces Series A Funding

Also this week, Diversio, a diversity, equality, and inclusion platform, raised $6.5M in series A funding. Participants included Chandaria Family Holdings, First Round Capital, and Golden Ventures. Plans for the funding include expanding the sales and client success teams, accelerating product development, and amplifying marketing efforts. Diversio combines analytics, AI, and subject matter expertise to understand where DEI efforts at organizations are getting derailed, and offer action plans for setting and meeting DEI goals.

Updates

DataRobot’s State of AI Bias Report Reveals 81% of Technology Leaders Want Government Regulation of AI Bias – DataRobot AI Cloud

On January 18, DataRobot released its State of AI Bias Report, assessing how AI bias can impact organizations, along with ways to mitigate said bias. Common challenges organizations face include the inability to understand the reasons for a specific AI decision, or the correlation between inputs and outputs, along with the difficulty of developing trustworthy algorithms and determining what data is used to train a given model. All of these challenges have led to some combination of lost revenue, customers, and employees, along with legal fees and reputation damage to the company; organizations are seeking guidance to avoid these issues.

Events

Domino Data Lab Hosts January 26 Virtual Event: Unleashing Exceptional Performance with Data Science

On Wednesday, January 26, Domino Data Lab will host a free one-hour virtual event: “Unleashing Exceptional Performance,” focusing on data science. Featured speakers include surgeon and author Dr. Atul Gawande, and Janssen Research and Development’s Chief Data Science Officer and Global Head of Strategy and Operations Dr. Najat Khan. There will be two sessions to accommodate various timezones, one at 1300 GMT and one at 11 am PT/2 pm ET. To register for the event, please visit the Domino event registration site.

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

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Alteryx Announces Acquisition of Trifacta

Yesterday, January 6, Alteryx announced that it has acquired Trifacta for $400M in a cash offer. Trifacta and Alteryx have historically been viewed as competitors, but Trifacta’s greater depth of capability re data engineering and cleansing complements Alteryx’ strengths in analytic workflows.

Product Launches and Updates

AI that understands speech by looking as well as hearing

Today, January 7, Meta debuted Audio-Visual Hidden Unit BERT (AV-HuBERT), a self-supervised framework for understanding speech that combines video input from lip movements and audio input from speech, both as raw unlabeled data. The goal is to improve accuracy even in environments where audio input may be compromised, such as from loud background noise.

Financial Transactions

Qlik Announces Confidential Submission of Draft Registration Statement Related to Proposed Public Offering

On Thursday, January 6, Qlik announced that it had confidentially submitted its draft regulation statement related to a proposed IPO. The expected IPO comes over five years after private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo purchased Qlik and took them private.

Fractal announces US$ 360 million investment from TPG

On Wednesday, January 5, Fractal, an AI and advanced analytics provider, announced that TPG, a global asset firm, will be investing $360M in Fractal. Puneet Bhatia and Vivek Mohan of TPG will join Fractal’s board of directors as part of the deal.

WEKA Increases Funding to $140 Million to Accelerate AI Data Platform Adoption in the Enterprise

WEKA, a data storage platform, announced on Tuesday, January 4, that they have raised $73M in a Series C funding round, raising total funding to $140M. The oversubscribed round was led by Hitachi Ventures. Other participants include Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Ibex Investors, Key 1 Capital, Micron, MoreTech Ventures, and NVIDIA. The funding will go towards accelerating go-to-market activities, operations, and engineering.

Hiring

Databricks Appoints Naveen Zutshi as Chief Information Officer

Finally, Wednesday, January 5, Databricks announced that it had appointed Naveen Zutshi as their new Chief Information Officer. Zutshi joins Databricks from Palo Alto Networks, where he was the CIO for six years, expanding Palo Alto Networks into new security categories and scaling up at speed. Prior to that, Zutshi was the SVP of Technology at Gap Inc, overseeing global infrastructure, ops, and security for the retailer.

Product Launches and Enhancements

IBM to Add New Natural Language Processing Enhancements to Watson Discovery

On November 10, IBM revealed new natural language processing enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery. Business users will be able to train Watson Discovery to surface insights more quickly on a corpus of industry-specific documents without needing traditional data science skills. Specific capability enhancements include pre-trained document structure understanding, automatic text pattern detection, and a custom entity extractor feature that will help identify industry-specific words and phrases with specific contexts. The announced enhancements are forthcoming, though IBM did not announce a target release date.

Informatica Announces Cloud Data Marketplace

On November 11, Informatica debuted their Cloud Data Marketplace. The Cloud Data Marketplace will allow Informatica business users to “shop” for both datasets and AI and analytics models, surfacing existing assets to encourage reuse of more-vetted resources rather than duplicating efforts by re-gathering data or building a model from scratch. Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace is available today with consumption-based pricing on Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud.

Tableau Outlines Product Vision and the Future of Analytics at Tableau Conference 2021

On November 9, at Tableau Conference 2021, Tableau announced a host of innovations for the Tableau platform and ecosystem, focused on bringing analytic capabilities to the workflows and environments workers already use. Highlights include Model Builder, a new feature in Tableau Business Science that allows Tableau users to build predictive models using Einstein Discovery; and Scenario Planning, another new Tableau Business Science feature to compare scenarios and “what-ifs,” supported by Einstein AI.

Partnerships

Domino Data Lab Expands Collaboration with NVIDIA and TCS with New Enterprise MLOps Solutions for Modern IT Stacks

On November 9, Domino Data Lab announced a fully-managed offering with solutions partner Tata Consultancy Services that allows Domino customers to run high-performance computing and data science workloads on NVIDIA DGX systems, hosted in the TCS Enterprise Cloud. This marks the next step in a deepening relationship between Domino and NVIDIA, with the Domino integration into the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite on the horizon.

Funding

H2O.ai Closes $100 Million in Funding Led by Customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia

On November 8, H2O.ai closed $100M in Series E funding. The round was led by customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with participation by existing investors Crane Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and new investor Pivot Investment Partners. The funding will be used to scale up partnerships, sales, marketing, and customer success at a global level.

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

Product Launches and Updates

Cloudera Introduces Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud

On August 16, Cloudera launched Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud to better manage customer data flows. When too many data flows are deployed into a single cluster, performance often falters, yet choosing larger infrastructure footprints “just in case” is expensive. Cloudera DataFlow was created to automate and manage complex cloud-native data flow operations, automatically scale up and down said streaming data flows more efficiently, and cut customers’ cloud costs. Cloudera DataFlow is generally available on AWS now.

Latest Release of the SnapLogic Platform: Self-service Integration and Automation

On August 17, SnapLogic announced its August 2021 product release, introducing no-code SnapLogic Flows for business users, ELT support to Databricks’ Delta Lake, and zero downtime upgrades, along with updating its API lifecycle and development portal. SnapLogic Flows will enable business users to construct data flows and apps to integrate into popular business software such as Salesforce without needing to know how to code, while allowing IT to provide guiderails and requirements to oversee said apps. New features in SnapLogic API lifecycle management include the abilities to maintain, improve, unpublish, deprecate, and retire APIs, ensuring that older versions aren’t used in error.

Funding

Apollo GraphQL Announces $130 Million Series D Investment to Power the Future of Graph and Application Development

On August 17, Apollo GraphQL announced a $130M Series D funding round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing funders Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures, and new investor Next47. The funding will be used on continuing R+D of open source graph technology to make app development faster and more accessible.

Monte Carlo Raises Series C, Brings Funding to $101M to Help Companies Trust Their Data

On August 17, Monte Carlo, a data reliability company, announced a $60M Series C funding round, led by ICONIQ Growth. Salesforce Ventures, along with existing investors Accel, GGV Capital, and Redpoint Ventures, all participated. Monte Carlo will use the funds to expand its product offerings, support more use cases, and open up to new markets.

Acquisitions

Adapdix acquires Edge Intelligence to bring data and AI closer together

Adapdix, an edge AI/ML platform, announced the acquisition of Edge Intelligence, a data management platform, on August 16. Edge Intelligence will improve Adapdix’ existing EdgeOps Data Mesh with better data management capabilities, and allow Adapdix to expand its existing offerings in edge automation.

Hiring

Fermín Serna Joins Databricks as Chief Security Officer

On August 19, Databricks announced that they had appointed Fermín Serna as the company’s new Chief Security Officer. Serna is coming over from Citrix, where he was the Chief Information Security Officer; before this, Serna was the Head of Product Security at Google. At Databricks, Serna will lead the network, platform and user security programs, as well as governance and compliance efforts.

TigerGraph Adds Industry Leader and Trailblazer to its Executive Team; Announces Fall Graph + AI Summits

On August 19, TigerGraph, a graph analytics platform, announced that they had hired Dr. Jay Yu as Vice President of Product Innovation, and as GM at the San Diego Innovation Center for TigerGraph. Dr. Yu comes to TigerGraph from 18 years at Intuit, where he led the Financial Knowledge Graph project and encouraged graph technology adoption in large commercial cases. TigerGraph also announced the Graph + AI Summit for this fall on two dates, October 5 in San Francisco and October 19th in New York. Both hybrid events will be livestreamed to virtual attendees, as well as including in-person attendance.