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.

Funding

Baseten Raises $12M A Round, Launches Product to Turn Machine Learning Models into Apps

Baseten, a platform that turns machine learning models into web applications, announced on April 26 that they had raised $20M in combined seed and Series A funding. The seed round of $8M was co-led by Greylock and South Park Commons Fund, while the A round was led by Greylock. Baseten also formally launched their product into public beta. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park was quoted in Baseten’s press release announcing the funding and launch.

Enveil Secures $25M B Round

Enveil, a data privacy company, announced that it had closed $25M in Series B financing this week. USAA led the oversubscribed round, with participation from existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Capital One Ventures, C5 Capital, Cyber Mentor Fund, DataTribe, GC&H, In-Q-Tel, Mastercard, and 1843 Capital. Enveil plans to put the funds towards product development, expanding sales, and marketing.

Exafunction Raises $25 Million Series A Funding Led by Greenoaks | Business Wire

Exafunction, a deep learning infrastructure company, announced $25M in Series A financing. Greenoaks led the round, with Founders Fund participating. The funding will go towards R+D, customer training, and performance improvements, in particular around GPU virtualization.

RelationalAI Raises $75M B Round, Bringing Total Funding to $122M

On April 26, RelationalAI, a knowledge graph system builder, announced that they had closed $75M in a Series B funding round. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from existing investors Addition, Madrona Venture Group, and Menlo Ventures. The funding will go towards R+D and go-to-market activities. As part of the transaction, Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake, has joined the RelationalAI board.

Synthesis AI Raises $17M in Series A Funding

On April 28, Synthesis AI, a synthetic data platform, announced that they had closed $17M in Series A financing. New investor 468 Capital led the round, with participation from additional new investors Sorenson Ventures and Strawberry Creek Ventures and existing investors Bee Partners, iRobot Boom Capital, Kubera Venture Capital, and PJC. Synthesis AI will use the funds for hiring, product development, and R+D at the intersection of AI and computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Launches and Updates

Akamai Debuts Linode Managed Database Service

On April 25, Akamai launched a managed database service powered by Linode, which Akamai acquired back in March. The service handles common maintenance and deployment tasks associated with database management, allowing for better performance and uptime. The launch reflects Akamai’s expansion into database management services to go along with its existing networking capabilities.

Arize AI Launches Bias Tracing to Address Algorithmic Bias

Arize AI, a machine learning observability platform, launched Arize Bias Tracing this week. The tool helps data science and machine learning teams monitor models for bias, discover what features and cohorts contribute to bias in a given model, and mitigate the impact of bias on said model.

Credo AI Reveals Responsible AI Governance Platform

Credo AI, a governance solution for AI, launched its Responsible AI platform this week. Key features in Responsible AI include a pipeline that ingests assessments from Credo AI Lens and translates them into risk scores across common AI risk areas; a repository for critical governance artifacts; the ability to assess AI risk and compliance of third-party AI and ML models via a dedicated portal.

Expert.ai Releases New Version of its Platform, Provides “Knowledge Model” AI Accelerators

Expert.ai, a natural language hybrid AI platform, announced the latest version of its platform on April 26. Notable features include a set of “Knowledge Models,”, which are pre-configured rules-based models that can extract entities, insights, and relationships from text within specific domains. Included domains with this release are finance, life sciences, environmental, social, and governance (ESG), personally identifiable information (PII), and behavioral and emotional traits. In addition, Azure has been added as a deployment environment, Boomi and Qlik can now be used to connect to third-party applications, and custom Python and Java can be used in the natural language workflow orchestrations.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Reveals Machine Learning Development Environment

On April 27, Hewlett Packard Enterprise debuted their HPE Machine Learning Development System. The System consists of HPE’s machine learning platform, HPE Machine Learning Development Environment, along with hardware and software to optimize development, training, and deployment of machine learning models.

Tableau Expands Analytics Embedding Capabilities

At Salesforce TrailblazerDX ’22, Tableau announced additional capabilities around embedding analytics. These include Web Data Connector 3.0, which allows data developers to build connectors from their data to a web application; v3 of Tableau’s Embedding API, so Tableau analytics can be integrated into any application using web components; Embeddable Web Authoring, the ability to edit Tableau visualizations within any application or web portal; Connected Apps for Seamless Authentication, which permits Tableau to be integrated into developers’ applications with proper authentication; and Tableau Actions with Salesforce Flow, the ability to trigger workflows in Flow directly from a Tableau dashboard.

Partnerships

Informatica and Snowflake Integrate Governance Features

Informatica and Snowflake continue to grow their partnership. This week, Informatica announced an integration between Snowflake Data Cloud’s native governance features and Informatica’s Cloud Data Governance and Catalog. The integration will provide a dashboard allowing for easy monitoring of data governance, access controls, and end-to-end lineage.

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

Funding

Dassana Surfaces From Stealth, Secures $5M in Seed Round

Cloud log lake company Dassana secured $5M in seed funding this week. Dell Technologies Capital led the round, with participation from additional angel investors. Dassana also announced that the Dassana Cloud Log Lake was now in public beta, distinguished by separating storage and compute to promote cost savings, and an optimized storage data structure to make queries to its cloud log lake highly performative.

Partnerships

Arcion Partners With Databricks

Last week, Arcion launched Arcion Cloud, its data replication platform; this week, Arcion announced that Arcion Cloud was now available via Databricks Partner Connect, enabling Databricks users to begin using Arcion to copy and move data from high-volume transactional databases without requiring coding skills.

Privitar Partners with Denodo

Data provisioning software provider Privitar announced a strategic partnership with Denodo, a data integration and management software provider. Combining Denodo’s data virtualization capabilities with Privitar’s focus on data provisioning and privacy will allow customers to provision their data in more easily reusable ways, while enforcing proper access and governance, and remaining compliant with applicable regulations.

Launches and Updates

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now Generally Available

At AWS Summit yesterday, Amazon announced the release of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2. Aurora Serverless is a database option for applications with unpredictable traffic that automatically scales capacity up and down as needed. Improvements to v2 include significantly quicker scaling speeds (fractions of a second as opposed to taking several seconds and up to nearly a minute in some cases with v1), and more granular scaling capabilities (v1 could only increase capacity by doubling).

Azure Managed Grafana Now In Preview

On April 18, Microsoft announced that Azure Managed Grafana was now available in preview, allowing Azure customers to integrate Grafana dashboards into their Azure environment, facilitating access to Azure services and data sources from within said dashboards. This includes the ability to securely share Grafana dashboards with Azure Active Directory.

Databricks Announces Media and Entertainment Lakehouse Offering

In the continuing rollout of vertical-specific lakehouse offerings, this week, Databricks debuted its Media and Entertainment Lakehouse. Notable features include accelerators for core industry use cases such as AI-driven recommendation engines, advertising optimization, and customer lifetime value and churn, among others.

StreamNative Launches StreamNative Cloud for Kafka

On April 21, StreamNative, a messaging and event streaming platform, announced StreamNative Cloud for Kafka. The new product addresses a couple of common issues Kafka users encounter with particularly high volumes of streaming data, while allowing users to continue ingesting streaming data formatted in the Kafka protocol but processing it under the hood using Apache Pulsar. StreamNative, founded in 2019, raised a $23M A round last fall.

TIBCO WebFOCUS 9.0.0 Makes its Debut

On April 19, TIBCO announced the release of TIBCO WebFOCUS 9.0.0. Key additions include a Container Edition of WebFOCUS, which permits Kubernetes deployments from within WebFOCUS; the Hub, a directory that makes it easier for users to access content and data from any device within WebFOCUS; and Designer updates that streamline the ability to create, manage, and stage datasets when creating content.

VIANAI Systems Introduces Vian H+AI

On April 19, Vianai Systems, an AI platform company headed by former SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, launched the Vian H+AI platform. The initial rollout includes Vian MLOps, to manage, optimize, deploy, and govern machine learning models. Key capabilities include model risk monitoring, software-based performance optimization, and quick model operationalization.

Appointments

SAS Data Ethics Director Reggie Townsend Named to National AI Advisory Committee

Reggie Townsend, director of the Data Ethics Practice for SAS, has been named to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC). The NAIAC advises the President on AI-related issues; members of the committee serve three-year terms. Townsend is also on the board of EqualAI, a nonprofit that works to reduce unconscious bias in AI development and usage.

Events

IBM’s Annual Think Conference to Expand Globally

IBM Think 2022 will kick off its flagship event in person in Boston on May 10, to be followed by a global “Think on Tour” series of invite-only gatherings. IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna will provide the opening keynote in Boston. Key conference themes will include how AI and automation provide opportunities to rethink business operations, among other topics. IBM will also present Think Broadcast on May 10 and 11, a live anchored program for those who cannot attend Think 2022 in person.

One Last Note

61% of People Believe Bots Will Succeed Where Humans Have Failed with Corporate Sustainability

According to a new Oracle-Harvard study. Whether this speaks to the survey respondents’ faith in AI or doubt in humanity …

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

Funding and Finances

Alteryx Announces Q1 2022 Financial Results Release Date
Microsoft Announces Quarterly Earnings Release Date (Q3 2022)
SAP to Release Q1 2022 Results

This week, Alteryx, Microsoft, and SAP all announced the release dates of their most recent quarterly earnings results. SAP’s results will be broadcast April 22, Microsoft will reveal their results April 26, and Alteryx will release their earnings statement May 3.

Noogata Closes $16M Series A

Noogata, a no-code AI platform, announced April 12 that it had closed $16M in Series A Funding. Eight Roads led the funding round, with participation from Allon Ventures. Noogata will use the funding to expand their presence in the US, along with funding further R+D operations in Israel.

Partnerships

Anaconda Announces Esri Collaboration

On April 12, data science platform Anaconda announced a collaboration with geographic information software provider Esri. Esri’s ArcGIS users now have access to preloaded geospatial packages which can be used to do data analysis in Python while working in a familiar ArcGIS environment.

Launches and Updates

Announcing Arcion Cloud

On April 12, Arcion announced the launch of Arcion Cloud, a data replication platform. Arcion Cloud uses change data capture technology to make the process of transferring data between transactional databases and cloud analytics platforms more efficient. At launch, Arcion Cloud works with Oracle, MySQL, Snowflake, Databricks, and SingleStore.

NoSQL Database ScyllaDB Now Available on AWS Marketplace

ScyllaDB, a high-performance, low-latency NoSQL database, announced April 13 that it was now available on the AWS Marketplace, expanding from its original GCP presence. AWS users will be able to purchase Scylla Cloud and Scylla Enterprise via their existing AWS accounts, rather than having to establish a separate contract with Scylla.

Events

Domino Data Lab Reveals Rev 3 Speaker Lineup and Agenda

Domino Data Lab revealed the lineup for its 2022 Rev 3 Summit in New York May 5-6. The theme for this year’s event is “Data Science: Driving Breakthroughs and Innovations for Enterprise and Humanity.” Keynote speakers include Nobel Prize winning professor Dr. Jennifer Doudha, Google Chief Decision Scientist Cassie Kozyrkov, and authors James Clear and Cass Sunstein, among others. To register for the conference, please visit the Rev 3 website.

MathWorks Offers Sneak Peek of MATLAB EXPO 2022 Online

MATLAB EXPO 2022 will be held live online May 17-18, 2022., across multiple time zones. Featured speakers will include Dr. Tanya Morton, Worldwide Director Customer Success Engineering at Mathworks; Dr. Talitha Washington, Director of the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative; Rolls-Royce Head of Systems and Software Jonathan Cooper; and Gulfstream Aerospace Senior Project Manager Chris Watkins. The conference is free; register on the MATLAB EXPO website.

Snowflake Summit 2022 Addresses Data Collaboration

Snowflake Summit 2022 will be held in Las Vegas June 13-16, 2022. The theme of the summit is “The World of Data Collaboration.” Highlighted speakers will include Snowflake Chairman and CEO Frank Slootman, Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products Benoit Dageville, and free-solo rock climber Alex Honnold, among numerous customer speakers. Register for Snowflake Summit on the event website.

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

Funding

Ascend.io Announces $31 Million Series B Funding Round

On April 6, Ascend.io, a data and analytics engineering automation platform, announced that they had secured a $31M Series B round of financing. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from existing investor Accel and new investor Shasta Ventures. The funding will be used to expand go-to-market efforts and target geographies, as well as broadening the scope of supported cloud platforms.

data.world Announces $50M Series C Funding Round

On April 5, data.world, an enterprise data catalog, announced a $50M Series C funding round. Goldman Sachs’’s Growth Equity group led the funding round. Additional contributions came from Prologis Ventures, Sandbox Insurtech Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Vopak Ventures, and individual angel investors. Funding will go towards hiring, global geographic expansion, and product development.

ReadySet Launches, Reveals $29M in Early Funding

On April 5, ReadySet, a SQL caching engine, officially launched, revealing $29M in seed round and Series A funding. Index Ventures led the A round, with participation by Amplify Partners and additional angel investors. The funding will go towards product development.

Product Launches and Updates

Welcoming Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics

Atlassian announced new capabilities of its Atlassian Platform at its Team 22 event earlier this week. The Atlassian Data Lake will gather data from the various Atlassian apps in one place for convenient querying. At launch, the focus is on data from Jira Software and Jira Service Management, but Atlassian plans to include its other apps soon. As for actually analyzing the data, Atlassian used technology from its Chartio acquisition last year to build Atlassian Analytics, which connects to the Atlassian Data Lake and generates analytics and visualizations of data both in the data lake, and combined with third-party data as well.

Databricks Makes Delta Live Tables Generally Available

On April 5, Databricks announced that Delta Live Tables was now generally available. Delta Live Tables automates repetitive, time-consuming parts of data pipeline operation and maintenance so that data engineers and analysts can focus on the actual data.

LightBeam.ai Debuts its Data Privacy Automation Platform

LightBeam.ai came out of stealth mode April 6, announcing the general availability of its data privacy automation platform. LightBeam consolidates and automates data compliance processes that are often manually managed at the moment, helping companies abide more strictly by data privacy regulations.

Monitaur Launches GovernML Addition to ML Assurance Platform

Monitaur, an AI governance company, announced the general availability of GovernML on April 6, part of its ML Assurance suite to monitor machine learning models for bias, risk, and other behavioral issues. GovernML will create a system of record providing a governance offering around the AI lifecycle, offering key features such as policy management, technical monitoring, and human oversight of model performance and results.

Partnerships and Acquisitions

Debuting the Data Cloud Alliance

On April 5, Google Cloud joined with nearly a dozen other companies (Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst) to found the Data Cloud Alliance, committing to making data more accessible and mobile across a wide variety of environments. Alliance members will strive to reduce complexity in data environments by providing infrastructure, APIs, and support for data portability and accessibility between platforms, working towards building digital data standards the members will support in common.

NetApp Announces Intent to Acquire Instaclustr

NetApp announced April 7 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Instaclustr, a database and data app deployment service. While NetApp has long been known for its data storage capabilities, its acquisition of Instaclustr is the latest in a series of procurements reflecting a significant expansion of data management capabilities among their offerings.

Talend Acquires Gamma Soft

On April 7, data integration company Talend announced that it had acquired Gamma Soft, a change data capture company. Combining Gamma Soft’s change data capture capabilities with Talend’s data integration and management functionality will help Talend customers process data changes more quickly.

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

Funding (and an Acquisition)

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

Datagen Obtains $50 Million in Series B Funding

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

Hex Raises $52M Series B

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

Product Launches and Updates

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

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

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

HEAVY.AI Introduces Version 6.0

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

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

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

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

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

Hiring

Dataiku Brings Aboard Adam Towns as CFO

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

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

Featured: Healthcare Data Announcements During HIMSS22

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

H2O.ai Reveals Portfolio of Healthcare AI Apps

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

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

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

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

Snowflake Launches Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud

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

Funding

Synthetaic Secures $13M Series A Financing

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

Product Launches and Updates

DataRobot AI Cloud 8.0 Now Available

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

Dataiku Debuts Cloud Stack Accelerator on AWS

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

Partnerships

Alteryx Updates Partner Program

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

Databricks Introduces Brickbuilder Solutions, Extending Its Partner Program

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

Tecton and Redis Integrate for Realtime Feature Store Access

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

Hiring

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

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

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

Product Updates

Databricks Debuts Lakehouse for the Healthcare and Life Sciences Industries

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

Collibra Extends Data Intelligence Cloud with New Capabilities

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

Vyasa Launches Cortex for Visual Data Fabric Creation and Management

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

Funding

Atlan Raises $50M Series B

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

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

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

Oracle Announces Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Financial Results

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

Partnerships

Appen Partners with, Invests in Synthetic Data Business Mindtech

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

Anodot Partners with Snowflake’s Data Cloud

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

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.