Category: From BI to AI

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

Acquisitions

IBM Expands Observability Capabilities with Databand.ai Acquisition

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

Launches and Updates

Meta Debuts Improved Language Translation Model and Dataset

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

Ontotext Releases GraphDB 10.0

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

Databricks Data + AI Announcements

Databricks Debuts Improvements to Data Lakehouse at Data + AI Summit

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

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

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

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

Other Launches and Updates

Kyligence Debuts Unified Metrics Store

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

TigerGraph Updates TigerGraph Cloud

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

Funding

Opaque Systems Raises $22 Million in Series A Funding

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

Snowplow Raises $40M in Series B Funding

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

Timecho Raises $10M Seed Round

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

Hiring

Bridget Shea Appointed as Dataiku’s New Chief Customer Officer

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

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

Funding

Bain Capital Invests $150M into Data Management Platform Ataccama

On June 22, data management platform provider Ataccama announced that they had received $150M in growth capital from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities as a minority investment. The funds will go towards sales and marketing, R+D around new product innovation, and global expansion. Ataccama has only taken funding once before in the form of a $500K seed round in 2010 when it spun off from big data company Adastra; this much more significant investment indicates a desire to grow more quickly to take on the IPaaS competition like Informatica and Talend.

Launches and Updates

At Everyday AI, Dataiku Debuts Dataiku 11

At their Everyday AI conference this week in London, data science and AI platform Dataiku launched Dataiku 11. Key features of this major release include optimized tooling for advanced users, an integrated data labeling framework for inline image annotation, a visual interface for computer vision tasks allowing data scientists at all levels to work on models for complex object detection and image classification, and expanded capabilities around Responsible AI and AI governance. Dataiku 11 also includes tools for non-coding team members such as a no-code visual time series forecasting capability, a centralized feature store and workflows for more easily sharing and reusing existing work, and “what-if” accelerators to evaluate potential business outcomes in a codeless way.

Domino Data Lab Announces Nexus, a Hybrid MLOps Architecture

First previewed at the Rev 3 conference last month, Domino officially launched its Nexus hybrid MLOps architecture this week. Customers using Nexus will be able to use owned on-prem NVIDIA GPUs for cost optimization, while also having the ability to scale workloads to include cloud-based GPUs when they don’t have enough capacity on-prem. NVIDIA is a launch partner of NEXUS, and Domino has joined the NVIDIA AI Accelerated program as part of their ongoing partnership around building, managing, and deploying GPU-trained models.

Precisely Launches Data Integrity Suite

Data integrity platform Precisely announced the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, a collection of SaaS modules that can be deployed individually or in concert to provide businesses with trustable data. The Data Integration, Data Observability, and Data Governance modules are now available for early access, while modules for Data Quality, Geo Addressing, Spacial Analytics, and Data Enrichment are forthcoming.

Prophecy Launches Low-Code “Prophecy for Databricks”

Low-code data engineering platform Prophecy launched Prophecy for Databricks this week. Prophecy for Databricks is a drag-and-drop interface to create and launch data pipelines on Spark, empowering data analysts to become “citizen data engineers.” The visual interface generates PySpark or Scala code to create these pipelines, then uses standard Databricks Workflows to manage the pipelines in production. Databricks users can access Prophecy for Databricks through Databricks Partner Connect.

Acquisitions

Anaconda Acquires Cloud-Based Development Environment PythonAnywhere

Earlier this week, Anaconda acquired cloud-based Python development and hosting platform PythonAnywhere. Anaconda users will now be able to use Python in a cloud environment, accessing the PythonAnywhere development environment from any web browser and allowing for better team collaboration and asset sharing.

Starburst Acquires Data Lake Analytics Accelerator Varada

Analytics company Starburst announced this week that they had acquired Varada, a data lake analytics accelerator. Varada’s proprietary indexing technology drew Starburst’s interest in hopes of advancing the performance and cost efficiency of their existing query engine. The rollout is expected to be quick; Starburst is expecting to roll Varada’s capabilities out to select customers by the end of July, with general availability in the fall of 2022.

Hiring

Chris Riley Joins DataRobot as President of Worldwide Field Operations

On June 21, DataRobot announced that they had appointed Chris Riley as the President of Worldwide Field Operations. Riley comes to DataRobot from Automation Anywhere, a robotic process automation company, where he served as the Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to that, Riley spent time at Dell as the President of Dell Technologies Select, and as President of the Americas for Dell Technologies.

Events

Databricks Data + AI Summit 2022, June 27-30

The 2022 Databricks Data + AI Summit will be held in-person in San Francisco and virtually, June 27-30, with the theme “Destination Lakehouse” to focus on how the modern data stack functions to turn data into actions more quickly. Key speakers include Databricks co-founders Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, and Reynold Xin; Google Brain and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng; Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford AI Lab; Insitro founder and CEO Daphne Koller; Hidden Door co-founder and CEO Hilary Mason; AI pioneer Peter Norvig; Girls Who Code CEO Tarika Barrett; and Thoughtworks director Zhamak Dehghani. The conference is sold out in person, but to attend virtually, register at Data + AI Summit.

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

Snowflakes in June

The biggest news: Snowflake Summit 2022 was this week, and a wide variety of data companies released announcements in conjunction with the conference, whether technical or fiscal in nature.

Snowflake Releases Unistore, A Workload Combining Transactional and Analytical Data in One Platform

Snowflake itself had several major announcements at Snowflake Summit 2022. The first covered the debut of Unistore, a workload that will allow Snowflake users to store transactional and analytical data together in a Snowflake data warehouse. Snowflake’s new Hybrid Tables will enable this new approach; customers will be able to perform fast analytics on transactional data stored in Snowflake for more timely understanding, and build transactional apps atop Snowflake.

Snowflake Introduces Native Application Framework

Snowflake also announced a Native Application Framework. Developers will be able to build data applications on Snowflake and monetize them on the Snowflake Marketplace, allowing Snowflake consumers to install and run those applications securely in their own Snowflake instances without needing to move or share data. In conjunction with this, Informatica launched their new enterprise data integrator on Snowflake, reflecting an expanded partnership with Snowflake.

The Register interviewed Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park on Snowflake’s Announcements, covering Unistore and the Snowflake Native Application Framework.

Snowflake Expands Native Python Support and Data Access with Snowpark for Python

Finally, Snowflake announced a number of changes demonstrating stronger Python support for machine learning and application development on Snowflake. First, Snowflake launched Snowpark for Python into public preview, broadening from existing Scala and Java support. This means that Python’s open-source packages and libraries are now accessible within Snowpark, providing a strong foundation for the most popular language for building machine learning models. Additional support for Python developers includes a new Streamlit integration for easier app development on Snowflake; Snowflake Worksheets for Python to enable development of machine learning models, pipelines, and applications directly in Snowsight; large memory warehouses to support memory-intensive operations like feature engineering and model training on large datasets, enabled through Snowflake’s Anaconda integration; and SQL Machine Learning, allowing data analysts to more easily use machine learning algorithms without requiring advanced knowledge. The first algorithm available is time-series forecasting. Finally, Snowflake also increased data access with better support for ingesting and transforming streaming data, and working with data external to the Snowflake Data Cloud, even on-prem data, while still conferring some of the advantages of storing data in Snowflake.

Funding

Domino Data Lab Reveals Investment from Snowflake Ventures

Domino Data Lab announced an investment from Snowflake Ventures this week for an undisclosed amount, following up on Snowflake Ventures’ previously unannounced participation in Domino’s Series F funding round last October. The additional investment demonstrates the strength of the Snowflake-Domino partnership being robust enough for Snowflake to take an equity stake in Domino, rather than being solely a technical partnership.

Matillion Announces Snowflake Ventures Investment

Data integration platform Matillion also announced an investment from Snowflake Ventures. As part of this ongoing “investipartnership,” Matillion will be among the first Snowflake data integration partners to use the just-announced Snowflake Native Application Framework by making Matillion connectors available directly within Snowflake.

Launches and Updates

KNIME Software Release: Improved Python, Snowflake Integrations

KNIME announced the latest release of their data science platform. Key new features include upgrades to KNIME’s Python support with a built-in Python environment and the ability to write KNIME extensions entirely in Python, as well as a Snowflake integration that allows users to build machine learning models in H2O.ai, and then push the model down to Snowflake for predictions.

Okera Now Generally Available on Snowflake

Data security and governance company Okera announced that Okera was now available on Snowflake as a SaaS offering for Snowflake Data Cloud. Okera’s universal data authorizaton policies are automatically translated into Snowflake data access governance controls, allowing native data security policy enforcement within Snowflake.

Yellowbrick Launches Latest Version of its Data Warehouse

Cloud data warehouse Yellowbrick released a new version of its platform this week. Key features include on-prem and AWS deployment options (Azure and Google Cloud Platform coming in Q3), data lake integration using Parquet, separation of compute and storage for more elastic scaling on demand, and multiple payment models (consumable either on-demand or through a subscription based on fixed capacity). Yellowbrick also announced two new partnerships with Saarthee and Saxon, two data and analytics companies.

Partnerships

H2O.ai Expands Snowflake Partnership

H2O.ai continues to grow its Snowflake partnership. Users are able to use H2O.ai machine learning capabilities on the data within their Snowflake environment; H2O.ai is expanding support for financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare customers doing 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

Immuta Raises $100 Million Series E Round

On June 8, secure data access platform Immuta announced that it had raised $100M in Series E funding. NightDragon led the round, with participation from new investor Snowflake Ventures, and prior investors Dell Technologies Capital, DFJ Growth, IAG, Intel Capital, March Capital, StepStone, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Wipro Ventures. Immuta will use the funds for additional hiring in sales, marketing, and customer success, as well as continued R+D and building out strategic partnerships with other vendors in the cloud data space.

Matillion Reveals Strategic Investment from Citi Ventures

Enterprise cloud data integration platform Matillion announced a strategic investment from Citi Ventures this week for an undisclosed amount. Matillion’s last publicly shared valuation was $1.5B, after their series E round last September for $150M.

Launches, Updates, and Partnerships

Databricks Delivers Data Lineage For Unity Catalog

Databricks announced that data lineage for Unity Catalog is now available in preview on AWS and Microsoft Azure. The data lineage feature will let customers understand the history of any data in their lakehouse – where it came from, when was it created, who created it, how has it been modified from the original raw data import, and how it’s being used, among other features. Because this is done automatically, the results save time and provide better accuracy compared to manually tagging data with the relevant metadata, and allow organizations to better meet compliance standards and relevant regulations.

Dataiku Arrives on Azure

Dataiku announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure this week, launching the Dataiku cloud AI platform in the Azure cloud. Dataiku’s new cloud stack accelerator capability allows for automated deployment, configuration, and management of Dataiku’s Everyday AI platform on Azure with a template-based approach.

DataRobot Debuts AI Cloud Improvements at DataRobot AIX 2022

At DataRobot AIX 2022, DataRobot announced a number of improvements to their AI Cloud product. Notable enhancements include code-first notebooks integrated into AI Cloud, bringing capabilities from the recent Zepl acquisition into DataRobot’s offerings and augmenting support for code-centric data scientists; expanded enterprise-level MLOps capabilities for the full model lifecycle, including integrations with GitHub, SumoLogic, Splunk, Datadog, and Zendesk; bias mitigation that automatically identifies and adapts machine learning models exhibiting detectable bias prior to deployment; and automated compliance documentation, even for models built outside of DataRobot. DataRobot also broadened their partnership with Google Cloud, launching AI Cloud in the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Expert.ai Imports Its Natural Language Capabilities to Qlik

Expert.ai announced this week that it has joined the Qlik Technology Partner Program. Qlik users will be able to use expert.ai language intelligence within Qlik Cloud, including natural language capabilities such as sentiment analysis, document categorization, and text disambiguation.

New Features and Partnerships for Google Cloud Vertex AI

At this week’s Google Cloud Applied ML Summit, Google revealed numerous new features and partnerships for their applied machine learning product, Vertex AI. Google’s existing NVIDIA partnership yielded one-click deploy of NVIDIA AI solutions to Vertex AI Workbench, as well as the new Vertex AI Training Reduction Server, which optimizes multi-node distributed training on NVIDIA GPUs, reducing training time for large language models like BERT. Google also announced a new data partnership with Neo4j, allowing data scientists to work with data and build models in Neo4j Graph Data Science, then deploy the models using Vertex AI. One more partnership with Labelbox provided yet another integration, reducing the time required to label unstructured data and speed up the model development process. Finally, Google also announced the preview of several standalone features: Vertex AI Tabular Workflows, allowing users to choose which parts of the model building and deployment processes they want to use AutoML for while being more hands-on with other parts; Serverless Spark for Vertex AI Workbench for data scientists to launch a server less spark session within a notebook; and Vertex AI Example-Based Explanations, which helps data scientists diagnose issues in their models using explainable AI techniques.

Informatica Updates Global Partner Program with Three Initiatives

Informatica revealed enhancements for its Global Channel Partner Program this week to boost partnered sales and support efforts for cloud modernization with joint customers. The new initiatives include incentives to source bookings for Gold and Platinum-level partners; sales, delivery, and technical certifications to help partners in their engagements with joint customers; and a points-based Channel Rewards program to recognize individuals for their contributions.

KNIME Announces Strategic Partnership with Snowflake

Open source data science company KNIME announced a strategic partnership with Snowflake. Users will be able to use the low/no-code KNIME Analytics Platform to perform analytics on data stored in Snowflake.

RapidMiner Releases New Version of Cloud Platform

RapidMiner announced the release of a new version of their data science platform. The latest version marks a move to the cloud as a multi-tenant, SaaS offering.

Teradata Vantage with Amazon SageMaker Launches

Enterprise data platform Teradata introduced Teradata Vantage, a multi-cloud analytics platform integrated with machine learning service Amazon SageMaker. The partnership will allow Teradata customers to access machine learning capabilities via Amazon and apply it to data and analytics hosted on Teradata.

Events

TIBCO Analytics Forum 2022 to Occur June 13-15

TIBCO Analytics Forum (TAF) returns June 13-15, 2022. The online-only event has a theme of “Analytics in Time and Space.” Featured speakers include Ben Shneiderman, computer science professor and founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland; data visualization guru Nadieh Brehmer; David Baltar Boilève, data scientist at Hospital Universitario Lucus Augusti; Mark Lora, director of enterprise data systems, Taylor University; and Birchcliff Energy analytics engineer Monica Brookwell, among others. To register for the event, please visit TAF 2022

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

Funding

Gigasheet Raises $7M Series A Round

Gigasheet, a no-code analytics platform, announced that they had secured $7M in Series A funding. Participants in the funding round included Accomplice, Argon, Founder Collective, and REV, along with individual investors. The funds will go towards filling out their product road map and expanding their future enterprise offering.

One AI Announces $8M Seed Round, Launches NLP-as-a-Service

One AI, a natural language processing provider, announced that they had raised $8M in seed funding from angel investors. Along with the funding, One AI emerged from stealth, launching their NLP-as-a-Service offering. Their Language Skills API includes a number of NLP models for specific business use cases such as conversation and article summarization, clustering and text analytics, and emotion and sentiment extraction, among others. Developers will be able to use these models to transform unstructured text into structured data.

Launches and Updates

Incorta Integrates Delta Sharing, Data Apps

Incorta, a realtime analytics platform, debuted new capabilities this week. Among the new features are a native Delta Sharing integration, allowing Incorta customers to securely share operational data more quickly. Incorta also launched several data apps that acquire operational data from source systems and prepare it for analysis, with already-built business schemas and dashboards for Oracle EBS, Oracle ERP and EPM Clouds, Netsuite, SAP, and others.

Rockset Reveals Oracle Integration

Analytics platform Rockset announced a new integration with Oracle this week, allowing developers to run search, aggregations, and joins on data from Oracle databases in real time. Rockset ingests change data capture streams from Oracle, enabling swift analytical queries.

Saturn Cloud and Bodo.ai Announce Partnership to Make Python Analytics More Performant

Data science and machine learning platform Saturn Cloud and parallel data compute platform bodo.ai have launched a partnership. Bodo.ai software running within Saturn Cloud resources will allow data scientists to scale up their model prototypes to “petabyte-scale parallel processing production” without requiring tuning or re-coding a model for scaling.

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

Funding

Data Lineage Platform MANTA Announces $35M Series B

MANTA, an automated data lineage platform, announced that it had raised $35M in Series B funding. Forestay Capital led the round; existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Credo Ventures, SAP.io, and Senovo, and new investor European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also participated.

Informatica World 2022

Informatica Announces Numerous Updates at Informatica World 2022

At Informatica World, Informatica debuted a number of improvements for data management, data analytics, and data governance. New to the fold is INFACore, a plugin for data science and development frameworks to provide data management in data science and data engineering development environments, simplifying the process of composing data pipelines and deploying them to data apps. Informatica also launched Informatica ModelServe, a service to permit users to more easily deploy machine learning models.

Informatica continued growing their portfolio of vertical-specific versions of their Intelligent Data Management Cloud. The IDMC for Healthcare and Life Sciences addresses the need for master data management that provides a “single source of truth” on patient and provider data while complying with HIPAA regulations and significant governance requirements, as well as data quality rules gathered into the Data Quality Accelerator for Crisis Response to cleanse, standardize, and validate healthcare data. IDMC for Healthcare and Life Sciences also supports connectivity to common healthcare software packages. The IDMC for Financial Services complies with financial industry regulations, supports financial industry data standards, supplies a set of financial-industry-specific data rules gathered into the Data Quality Accelerator for Financial Services to process financial data, and provides metadata scanners specialized for extracting metadata from financial data.

Finally, Informatica announced several major partnerships with large cloud vendors. With Google, they launched the Informatica Data Loader for Google BigQuery, a no-code SaaS service that Google Cloud customers can use to quickly ingest data into their Google BigQuery cloud data warehouse. With Azure, Informatica announced a SaaS version of Informatica Master Data Management on Azure, currently in private preview. And with Oracle, Informatica has integrated Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud with Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Exadata Cloud@ Customer, and Oracle Object Storage. Oracle, in turn, has named Informatica as a preferred partner for enterprise cloud data integration and data governance for data warehouse and lakehouse solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Microsoft Build

Microsoft Integrates Power BI Into PowerPoint, Outlook, and the Office Hub; Launches Datamart Capabilities Within Power BI

At their Build conference this week, Microsoft unofficially welcomed Power BI to the Microsoft Office family as it announced significant integrations of Power BI into PowerPoint, Outlook, and the Office Hub at this week’s Microsoft Build conference. Power BI reports can now be embedded into Power Point and Outlook, bringing data interactivity capabilities into presentations and emails, and replacing out-of-date screenshots with live data visualizations that can be sliced, filtered, and drilled down into. Users will also be able to launch Power BI and find and consume related content directly from the Office Hub.

Microsoft also released a self-service “datamart” capability within Power BI. Business analysts will be able to use a no-code interface to build a data mart on top of any data warehouse or combination of data sources that can be centrally managed and governed, without needing to go through IT, saving time on both sides. The data mart automatically generates a dataset ready for report-building in Power BI, and users can find data marts easily in the Power BI Data Hub, Excel, and Teams.

Also at Microsoft Build, Microsoft Azure AI announced two updates to Azure Cognitive Services. Azure OpenAI Service allows customers to implement reasoning and comprehension capabilities for use cases such as code generation, writing assistance, and deconstructing unstructured data. Azure Cognitive Service for Language adds document and conversational summarization capabilities to help surface key information from unstructured data such as documents and contact center calls.

Azure Machine Learning revealed a number of updates. The Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard, now in preview, unites a number of capabilities to assess machine learning models in one pane of glass. Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints allow developers and data scientists to more easily deploy large-scale models; these managed endpoints are now generally available. (Machine learning platform Hugging Face is among the vendors collaboratively announcing their own endpoints powered by Azure Machine Learning’s managed endpoints service.) In addition, new AutoML features include support for natural language processing and image tasks, as well as enhancements for product integration and machine learning ops.

Finally, Microsoft also launched the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, an integrated platform that brings together databases, analytics, and governance. Within the platform, customers have access to four different Microsoft databases, three different Microsoft analytics services, and Microsoft Purview for governance.

Additional Launches and Updates

Alteryx Debuts FIPS-Compatible Version of Alteryx Designer

On May 25, Alteryx announced Alteryx Designer-FIPS, a version of Alteryx Designer that follows the data security and computer system standards specified in the Federal Information Processing Standards. With this announcement, government agencies and other public sector organizations will be able to automate analytics while complying with FIPS.

Hiring

Anaconda Names Shahz Afzal as SVP of Marketing & Strategy

On May 25, Anaconda welcomed Shahz Afzal as the SVP of Marketing and Strategy, to oversee Anaconda customer and open-source community engagement. Afzal was most recently the Global Head of ISV (Independent Software Vendors) at AWS, in charge of go-to-market strategies, data providers, and consulting partners within the AWS Marketplace. Prior to that, Afzal was Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Hybrid Cloud unit, and spent 15 years at Microsoft overseeing cloud transition initiatives. Anaconda also brought Python thought leaders Russell Keith-Magee and Antonio Cuni on board to support Anaconda as a force for data science in Python.

DataRobot Appoints Former Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins as Chairman of the Board

On May 24, DataRobot announced that they had appointed Mark Hawkins as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Hawkins has served on the DataRobot Board of Directors since 2021. Previously, Hawkins was the President and CFO for Salesforce, which went public and increased its valuation by over $200M during his tenure. Hawkins brings to DataRobot 35 years of experience leading finance teams within global technology companies including Autodesk, Logitech, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.

Funding

Heartex Raises $25 Million Series A

Heartex, the company behind open source data labeling platform Label Studio, announced that it had raised $25M in Series A funding. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Bow Capital, Swift Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and angel investors. Funding will go towards R+D for Label Studio, focusing on bias detection and mitigation, labeling automation, and other analytics and data quality management capabilities.

Imply Announces $100M Series D Round at $1.1B Valuation

Imply, an analytics database company, raised a $100M Series D funding round this week. Thoma Bravo led the round, with participation from new investors OMERS Growth Equity and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Funds, and Khosla Ventures.

Launches and Updates

Alteryx Reveals New Cloud Capabilities at Inspire Conference

On May 18, at Alteryx Inspire, Alteryx revealed improvements to its analytics platform. Key new capabilities include text mining and computer vision additions to the Alteryx Intelligence Suite to analyze unstructured data, enhancements to predictive time series modeling in Alteryx Machine Learning, and the integration of Trifacta into Alteryx Designer Cloud, which adds SSH tunneling to enhance cloud security and governance capabilities.

Tableau Cloud Debuts At Annual Tableau Conference

On May 17, Tableau revealed Tableau Cloud, the next generation of its previous Tableau Online offering, at its annual Tableau conference. New features include Data Stories, automatically-generated natural language generated explanations of Tableau Dashboards to help users more thoroughly understand what they’re seeing; expanding the number of Accelerators (customizable dashboard templates) in its Tableau Exchange store; and further integrating Einstein Discovery and Tableau capabilities within Salesforce CRM Analytics with text clustering to extract keywords from large text fields, and bias detection for multi class models to pinpoint the biasing variables in a model to be removed without requiring model retraining.

Franz’s AllegroGraph 7.3 Improves GraphQL Capabilities

On May 17, Franz Inc, a graph database company, announced AllegroGraph 7.3. This latest version includes upgraded GraphQL query capabilities to work with distributed knowledge graphs and data fabrics. Enhancements to the GraphQL APIs will allow for more complex and performant queries to support data-driven apps.

Apollo GraphQL Releases the Supergraph

On May 18, Apollo GraphQL launched what they’re calling the “supergraph,” a layer to facilitate collaboration between backend data and services and the apps and devices on the front end, but with ambitions for supporting future business needs in an agile composable manner. As part of defining their supergraph stack, Apollo is also launching Apollo Router, which processes GraphQL queries and returns results back to the client significantly faster than its predecessor. Finally, Apollo is adding two features to Apollo Studio’s free tier – Schema Checks, which audits newly composed schemas to protect client apps’ processing, and Launches, which provides a window into the schema-checking and schema-launching processes in Studio.

Ground Labs Reveals Enterprise Recon 2.6

Data discovery company Ground Labs announced the general availability of Enterprise Recon 2.6, a tool that allows companies to find and remediate personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information. New features include improvements to data access governance; new reporting features such as risk scoring and labeling; and the ability to scan for sensitive information on data sources like Google Cloud Storage, SAP HANA databases, Salesforce CRM, and Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop.

Komprise Debuts Smart Data Workflows

Komprise, an unstructured data discovery company, announced Komprise Smart Data Workflows, a process to find and discover relevant data across on-prem, cloud, and edge devices, and then direct said data to data lakes and AI and machine learning tools. Core improvements include expanding Deep Analytics Actions to include “copy and confine” actions from Deep Analytics queries, adding the ability to execute external functions via an API, and increasing global tagging and search capabilities in workflows.

Hiring

Databricks Welcomes Trâm Phi as Senior Vice President and General Counsel

On May 19, Databricks announced that they had appointed Trâm Phi as Senior Vice President and General Counsel. Prior to Databricks, Phi served as SVP, General Counsel at DocuSign, where she grew the legal function as DocuSign transitioned to a mature public company. Before that, Phi was the Chief Legal Officer and Chief of Staff at Imperva, and the Vice President, General Counsel at ArcSight, where she led both teams as the companies went public.

Events

Okera to Host AIRSIDE LIVE 2022 May 25-26

Okera will host AIRSIDE LIVE 2022 as both an in-person event in New York and a virtual event. The event will focus on four key pillars: data management, data security, data privacy and governance, and data as a product, to help companies safely and securely put their data to use. Featured speakers include Aaron Carreras and Nate Weisz from FINRA; Cheryl Flink from the Center for Creative Leadership,; Jeff Becraf, head of US Sales for Data and AI at Kindryl; Guy Adams, Chief Technology Officer at dataops.live, and Mike Meriton, co-founder and COO of the EDM Council. To attend the event, register on the Airside LIVE 2022 site.

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

Funding

Hugging Face Raises $100M C Round

Machine learning platform Hugging Face announced May 9 that they had raised $100M in Series C funding. Lux Capital led the round, with participation from Addition, AIX Ventures, a_capital, Betaworks, Coatue, Sequoia, SV Angel, and individual angel investors. Hugging Face will use the funding on R+D, product development, and education.

Predibase Announces $16.25M in Seed and A Round Funding, Emerges From Stealth

Predibase, a low-code machine learning platform, came out of stealth this week and announced $16.25M in Series A and seed funding. Greylock led both rounds, with participation from The Factory and angel investors. The funding will go towards hiring additional engineering and ML talent, as well as the go-to-market strategy and bringing Predibase into general availability.

Pyramid Analytics Closes $120M E Round

Pyramid Analytics, a decision intelligence and augmented analytics platform, announced on May 9 that they had closed $120M in Series E financing. HIG Growth Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings, General Oriental Investments, and Kingfisher Capital, and new investors JVP, Maor Investments, Sequoia Capital, and Viola Growth. Pyramid will use the money on product development, continued R+D, expanding partnerships globally, and hiring to support all of these efforts.

Launches and Updates

Databricks Strengthens AWS Partnership, Announces PAYGO Lakehouse Offering

On May 10, Databricks announced a pay-as-you-go lakehouse offering on AWS, available now. Customers will be able to launch a lakehouse from the AWS Marketplace whether or not they’ve used Databricks before; they can set up a Databricks account from within AWS, and even consolidate their Databricks usage bills into their AWS billing.

Google Serves Up LaMDA 2 Demos in its AI Test Kitchen

At Google I/O, Google unveiled its new Language Model for Dialog Applications (LaMDA) 2 conversational AI model, along with AI Test Kitchen, an app to demonstrate use cases for LaMDA 2. LaMDA is a generative text model, aiming to produce relevant textual responses based on patterns it recognizes from linguistic input. While no date has been announced for general availability, Google plans to open up LaMDA access to small groups of people.

Mindtech Chameleon Now Generates Diverse “Actors” to Address Bias

Mindtech Global, a synthetic data creation platform, has announced updates to its Chameleon platform. Chameleon 22.1 lets users automatically generate millions of “actors” in virtual worlds, creating privacy-compliant synthetic visual data for training computer vision systems. To address known bias issues, the Chameleon actors now have a range of configuration options, including height, build, age, skin tone, and clothing and hairstyle options.

Privacera Announces Release of Platform 6.3 and PrivaceraCloud 4.3

Privacera, a data access governance company, announced the release of the latest version of Privacera Platform 6.3 and PrivaceraCloud 4.3. New features include extending Attribute Based Access Control across all supported data and analytical sources, supplementing existing role-based and tag-based access control mechanisms; along with enhanced support for Google BigQuery, Starburst Enterprise, Databricks, and Snowflake.

ThoughtSpot Expands the Modern Analytics Cloud to Help Companies Dominate the Decade of Data

At their Beyond 2022 event this week, ThoughtSpot announced numerous new capabilities for their cloud analytics platform. Key updates include integrations and connectors for Amazon Redshift Serverless, Snowflake Data Marketplace, Databricks Partner Connect, Dremio, and Starburst Galaxy; templates, code samples, and ThoughtSpot Blocks to accelerate the development process; and automation capabilities to trigger actions based on analytics.

Events

DataRobot AIX 22 Celebrates AI Innovation, June 7-8, 2022

On June 7 and 8, DataRobot will host DataRobot AIX 22, a free virtual event to explore innovation in AI, analytics, and data science. Featured speakers include DataRobot executives Dan Wright, Debanjan Saha, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, and Michael Schmidt. Register for the event at the DataRobot AIX 22 website.

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

Funding

Accern Raises $20M Series B Round

On May 2, Accern, a natural language processing platform for unstructured data streams, announced a $20M Series B round of financing. Fusion Fund and Mighty Capital co-led the round, with additional participation from Gaingels, Shasta Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Viaduct Ventures. The funding will go towards expanding sales and marketing.

dotData Closes $31.6M B Round

dotData, a data science automation platform, announced that it had raised a $31.6M Series B funding round. Otsuka Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Ltd all participated in this round. dotData plans to use the money for product and service development, as well as expanding on sales efforts and business partnerships.

Galileo Emerges From Stealth with $5.1M Seed Round

Data intelligence platform Galileo emerged from stealth earlier this week with a $5.1M seed round. The Factory led the funding round, along with participation from additional angel investors. The funds will be used to accelerate hiring and R+D. The Galileo platform addresses data errors throughout the machine learning model lifecycle, focusing on unstructured data. Galileo is currently in private beta.

Launches and Updates

Domino 5.2 Release Announced, Generally Available in June

On May 5 at the Rev 3 conference, Domino Data Lab announced Domino 5.2, which will become generally available in June 2022. Key new features include the IntelliSize capability within Domino’s Durable Workspace, which will recommend the optimal size for a model development environment; a new data prep and visualization environment based on Apache Superset; integration with Snowflake to train models in-database in Snowpark, then deploy them to the Data Cloud for in-database scoring; and realtime model monitoring in the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Exasol Reveals New Capabilities for Exasol SaaS

Analytics database company Exasol announced that its Exasol SaaS database now interfaces natively with Keboola, a cloud-based Data Stack as a Service platform. In addition to the Keboola collaboration, additional new capabilities of Exasol SaaS include enhanced machine learning capabilities within the database, support for data virtualization without needing to migrate data, and an Amazon SageMaker extension that uses SageMaker AutoPilot to develop machine learning projects based on data stored in Exasol.

Google Cloud Launches New Data Solutions for Manufacturers

This week, Google Cloud launched two data solutions specifically for manufacturers, Manufacturing Data Engine and Manufacturing Connect. Manufacturing Data Engine integrates a number of key Google Cloud products (such as BigQuery and Looker, among others) with a platform for ingesting, transforming, storing, and providing access to factory data. Manufacturing Connect is an edge solution that can connect to and stream machine and sensor data from manufacturing assets and systems directly to Google Cloud.

MathWorks Launches Startup-Targeted Suites

MathWorks is now offering tech startups access to suites that include MATLAB, Simulink, and over 100 industry-specific development tool stacks at a reduced price. Startups who meet MathWorks’ criteria as determined through an application process may be eligible for “startup-friendly” pricing based on company size, annual revenue, and how long the company has been in business. Access to the MATLAB suite for qualified startups now starts at $1500 for an individual seat, while pricing for the MATLAB and Simulink suite starts at $3600 for an individual seat. Electric vehicle and automated driving startups are highlighted as particular areas of interest on the MathWorks for Startups website.

Starburst Announces New Capabilities for Galaxy, Enterprise

At the Trino Summit this week, analytics engine company Starburst revealed new capabilities for its Starburst Galaxy and Starburst Enterprise products. Galaxy now includes a new lakehouse capability, Great Lakes Connector for object storage catalogs, which now supports the Iceberg and Delta Lake table formats in addition to Apache Hive, allowing access to all of these formats in one data lake. New features for Enterprise include built-in access control for consistent governance across Enterprise, as well as a REST API to make it easier to build and use data products.

Hiring

CIA CISO Joins Salesforce – Salesforce News

On May 5, Salesforce announced that former CIA Chief Information and Security Officer William MacMillan has joined Salesforce as the SVP of Security Product and Program Management, BISO, and Acquisition Integration. MacMillan joins Salesforce after a nearly 20-year career with the CIA culminating in the CISO role. Prior to that, MacMillan was a combat rescue and special operations pilot in the Air Force.