Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category such as M&A activity, people movements, funding news, industry partnerships, customer wins, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide you a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help you keep abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel@insidebigdata.com. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.
Let’s get right with it – some late breaking industry scuttlebutt – new funding news … The Modular Analytics Company (TMAC), a UK-based artificial intelligence and machine learning solution provider, today announces it raised $600K (£400,000) in its latest round of funding from technology partner Instinctive BI for its innovative and affordable, enterprise-ready AI and ML solutions … Data platform provider SoundCommerce today announced its $15M Series-A financing led by leading enterprise SaaS venture firm Emergence Capital with participation from existing investors Defy Partners and Voyager Capital. The funding coincides with SoundCommerce’s commercial acceleration across the global consumer retail industry, fueling the company’s expanded hiring, platform capabilities and customer engagement … FundGuard, the AI-powered SaaS investment management and asset servicing enterprise platform, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series A funding round. The financing is being led by Team8 and existing investors Blumberg Capital and LionBird Ventures … ScienceLogic, a leading provider of AI-driven monitoring solutions for hybrid cloud management, announced today that it has raised $105 million in growth financing. Silver Lake Waterman led the company’s Series E round with participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and NewView Capital. The investment will support the company’s continued innovation in the AIOps market and further broaden ScienceLogic’s position within the $30+ billion IT Operations Management software market … Matillion, a leading cloud data integration platform, announced $100M in Series D funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners with financing from Silicon Valley Bank UK Branch. The funding will fuel the company’s growth, as it meets exploding demand for cloud data integration for global enterprise organizations such as Amazon, Siemens, Subway, Novartis, Slack, and Accenture … TigerGraph, provider of a leading graph analytics platform, announced it has raised $105 million in Series C funding, the largest funding round to date within the graph database and analytics market. The round was led by Tiger Global and brings TigerGraph’s total funding raised to over $170 million … Monte Carlo, the data reliability company, announced $25 million in new funding to spearhead the emerging Data Observability category and help organizations achieve more reliable data. This brings the company’s total funding to more than $40 million and the announcement comes shortly after their Series A financing, led by Accel. Redpoint Ventures, backers of Snowflake and Looker, and GGV Capital, investors of HashiCorp and Slack, co-led this round with participation from Accel. Monte Carlo is also backed by DJ Patil, the former Chief Data Scientist for the U.S., as well as top executives from Cloudera, eBay, Google and VMWare … Symend, a leading digital engagement platform that uses behavioral science and data-driven insights to empower customers to resolve past due bills, announced a US$43 million extension following its US$52 million Series B in May 2020. The Series B+ was led by global technology venture firm, Inovia Capital, with participation from a consortium of investors, bringing Symend’s total funding to date to over US$100 million … Vivacity Labs, the London-based tech company which uses artificial intelligence to improve traffic insights and safety, announced it has secured £5m of Series A funding in a VC round led by investor Mobeus, with additional funding from existing investors Downing Ventures and London Co-Investment Fund … LyteLoop, an emerging and revolutionary data storage company developing a method to utilize the power of ultra-high bandwidth lasers to store massive amounts of data in space, announced the successful closing of a $40M private, follow-on financing round. The capital will be used primarily to expand the LyteLoop team, which is developing an advanced data storage network to address the inefficiencies of existing land-based data storage—namely security, privacy, environmental and scalability issues … Adapdix Corporation, a digital transformation leader in Edge AI automation and intelligent control software, announced that it has received funding from SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, pushing the total investment amount secured by Adapdix up to $10 million. The new funds will be used to build the next generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for the edge, enabling real-time predictive analytics and maintenance for enterprises.
In M&A news we heard … Aunalytics, a leading data platform company, delivering Insights- as-a-Service for enterprise businesses announced the acquisition of Naveego, an emerging leader of cloud-native data integration solutions. The acquisition combines the Naveego® Complete Data Accuracy Platform with Aunalytics’ AunsightTM Data Platform to enable the development of powerful analytic databases and machine learning algorithms for customers … Calligo, the end-to-end managed data services provider, announced it has acquired Decisive Data, a pioneer in data analytics, data science and visualization. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The integration of US-based Decisive Data’s capabilities in data science and data analytics into Calligo’s existing data insights team, alongside its global privacy and security-centric managed data services, creates the most capable, accessible and compliant data insights service for modern businesses … CData Software has finalized an agreement to acquire forceAmp and its flagship product, DBAmp. This acquisition brings together leaders in Salesforce data connectivity and integration, and it offers CData customers yet another way to connect Salesforce to their broader ecosystem, as well as access critical data within SQL Server.
We also heard of a number of new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … McObject®, developer of the eXtremeDB® embedded database system, has announced that Logic Technology BV, one of the Netherlands’ leading re-sellers of embedded systems development products will promote its eXtremeDB small footprint, hybrid in-memory and persistent database in the Benelux countries through an exclusive distribution agreement, and non-exclusively in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Spain and Italy … As manufacturers and businesses ramp up the digital transformation of their supply chains to meet challenging times during the pandemic, Verusen, the Atlanta startup that leverages artificial intelligence (AI)and machine learning (ML) to build the intelligent, connected supply chain, and NTT DATA Global Solutions Corporation (NTT DATA GSL), a leading SAP partner in Japan, providing digital transformation and information technology services worldwide together with NTT DATA Group alliance, announced their new business alliance. The collaboration utilizes Verusen’s cloud-based AI platform and real-time inventory data management capabilities to strengthen and optimize customers’ existing SAP supply chain and inventory management implementations … To give its retail and manufacturing customers access to verified data on high-impact events that disrupt demand, Blue Yonder, a leader in digital supply chain and omni-channel commerce fulfillment, has partnered with demand intelligence provider PredictHQ, which works with brands such as Domino’s and Uber. PredictHQ will integrate its data from four event categories – school holidays, public holidays, religious and cultural observances, and academic events – into Blue Yonder’s demand planning solution giving its customers access to verified, standardized and enriched data. Customers can elect to extend the enriched data categories to also include sports events, concerts or even natural disasters … Diveplane, the company keeping humanity in artificial intelligence (AI), and BREATHE, the Health Data Research Hub for Respiratory Health in the United Kingdom, announced that they have entered into a new partnership. As a Supporting Partner, Diveplane will support BREATHE as they seek to improve and broaden the use of health data and electronic health records in respiratory research and innovation. Diveplane has developed several innovative AI solutions to tackle problems across a range of industries, including healthcare. GEMINAI, Diveplane’s flagship product, uses patented techniques to create synthetic datasets featuring entirely new data points from existing data. These new datasets maintain the statistical properties of the original without revealing any personally identifiable information, allowing the data to be shared widely while adhering to privacy regulations and protecting personal information … Provider of essential data storage infrastructure, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) announced that it has partnered with the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center to provide the storage foundation needed to scale and store critical research data focused on improving the accuracy of cancer detection from mammography scans. The University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center’s AI Precision Health Institute (AI-PHI) has deployed Western Digital’s Ultrastar Data60 Hybrid Storage Platform filled with 720TB of Ultrastar hard disk drives (HDDs). The organization is leveraging this data to run artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning to assess human health and predict the risk of disease to help relieve the increasing prevalence of cancer in the Pacific region … Lumiata has announced a new partnership with Ascend.io in order to provide customers with access to its proprietary data preparation process. This relationship will ensure that all Lumiata customers, regardless of their cloud environment, can work seamlessly with the company in their own virtual private cloud environment (VPC). Lumiata’s proprietary data preparation process is a data management solution for healthcare companies that need their healthcare data machine learning ready and solves the “garbage-in, garbage-out” cycle … Google Cloud and Databricks announced a new partnership to deliver Databricks at global scale on Google Cloud. Under the partnership, organizations can now use Databricks to create a lakehouse capable of data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics on Google Cloud’s global, scalable, and elastic network. Databricks on Google Cloud will deeply integrate with Google BigQuery’s open platform and will leverage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), enabling customers to deploy Databricks in a containerized cloud environment for the first time. With this integrated solution, organizations can unlock AI-driven insights, enable intelligent decision-making, and ultimately accelerate their digital transformations through data-driven applications … Narrative, the Data Streaming Platform that makes it easy to buy, sell and win, and Specialists Marketing Services, Inc. (SMS), a leading targeted marketing solution provider, announced they are partnering to give Narrative’s Data Streaming Platform users access to SMS’s comprehensive location database to help them better understand and target who their customers are, where those customers are, and what they are interested in.
In the new customer wins category we have … Exasol, the high-performance analytics database, announced that Pharmascience Inc., a leading Canadian manufacturer of prescription, over-the-counter, and behind-the-counter generic pharmaceuticals, has selected Exasol to give end-users faster, more efficient access to data. Pharmascience will use Exasol’s high performance analytics database to boost its business intelligence (BI) to deliver better reporting and performance.
In people movements news we learned … Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the appointment of veteran technologist Vinod Marur as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Marur will lead the global engineering team at Databricks, helping the company accelerate innovation and continue to scale the Databricks Lakehouse platform for exponential growth … Six Feet Up, a software company that helps organizations build apps faster, innovate with AI, simplify Big Data and leverage Cloud technology, is pleased to announce that Laura Stephens has joined the Sixie team as Vice President of Marketing. Stephens, formerly a Vice President at Finn Partners, brings 15 years of strategic communications leadership to the team … SingleStore, The Database of NowTM for cloud-native modern applications, announced that it has hired Paul Forte as its chief revenue officer (CRO). Forte, a 25-year tech veteran, has successfully led sales at several innovative, cloud and data-centric software companies and will be responsible for the development and execution of the company’s global sales strategy. He is charged with recruiting to expand SingleStore’s in-house talent and create processes that will allow the company to repeat its successes at scale … Aiven, a software company that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced the appointment of Julian Lange as Chief Financial Officer and James Arlen as Chief Information Security Officer to the Aiven team. Bringing a combined 35+ years of experience to Aiven, both Lange and Arlen represent key additions to an executive team the company has started building out last year … BriefCam, the provider of Video Content Analytics solutions, today announced the appointment of Igal Dvir as VP Technology & Product. In this newly created role, Dvir will oversee product vision, strategy, and roadmap execution to drive company-wide innovation … Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), a leader in analytic process automation (APA™), announced the appointment of Suresh Vittal as chief product officer (CPO). Vittal will report directly to Mark Anderson, chief executive officer (CEO), and will lead the Product Management, Engineering and Development organizations. He will also be responsible for the strategic vision of Alteryx’s leading analytics and data science innovation, including making machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) easily accessible to citizen users … Zaloni™, a leader in enterprise DataOps software, announced the addition of Kevin Mullen, Vice President of Customer Success, and Ashwin Nayak, Vice President of Engineering to its executive leadership team. In these roles, Mullen and Nayak will lead the organization’s efforts around accelerating innovation and delivering the Arena DataOps platform to customers around the globe.
Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC. NOTE: more patents in the U.S. are coming from other countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, and Israel.
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