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 the ball rolling with some new funding news … Rivery, the DataOps Platform raised $16M in a new financing round led by Entree Capital and existing investor State Of Mind Ventures (SOMV). Rivery is a SaaS DataOps platform that gives companies control over their organizational data through the ingestion, transformation, and orchestration of data processes. Since launching in 2019, Rivery has grown rapidly, adding hundreds of customers and seeing significant traction, 500% growth with enterprise companies, including Bayer, American Cancer Society, WalkMe, Entravision and Preqin. The new funding round will be used to accelerate growth across business and R&D teams. The company plans to triple in size globally, currently there are 60 open positions to be filled in 2021 … Feedzai, a leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, announced a $200 million Series D investment round led by leading global investment firm KKR, with participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures, and Citi Ventures. The new investment will be used to accelerate the company’s global expansion, further develop its product offerings, and boost its partner strategy to strengthen its position as one of the most comprehensive financial crime prevention and risk management solution in the market … Jumio, a leading provider of AI-powered end-to-end identity verification and eKYC solutions, announced it secured a $150 million investment from Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm that invests in high-growth, disruptive companies. This infusion represents the single largest funding round in the digital identity space and speaks to the global importance of establishing a user’s identity remotely to defend against fraud and financial crime, comply with KYC and AML regulations and boost online conversions. The investment will accelerate Jumio’s significant global lead in the digital identity space by devoting additional resources to automate its identity verification solutions, expand the breadth of the Jumio KYX Platform and grow its suite of AML compliance services. Jumio brings its pioneering document-centric identity approach to leading blue-chip companies across the telehealth, financial services, online gaming and social media spaces … The Modular Analytics Company (TMAC), a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence and machine learning solution provider, announced it raised $270K (£195k) in its latest round of angel funding from transformation partner Custerian for its fast, affordable, and outcome-focused AI and ML solutions … Aiven, a software company that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced it raised $100M in its Series C, bringing the company’s total investment to $150M and a valuation of more than $800M. The round was led by Atomico, with participation from World Innovation Lab and Salesforce Ventures as new investors. Lead investors of Aiven’s Series A (Earlybird Venture Capital) and Series B (IVP) also significantly increased their capital commitments to Aiven. Aiven will use the proceeds from the round to bring new products to market, increase contributions to developing open source technologies and continue the company’s international expansion. Aiven’s products are universally applicable, and the new investment and new investors will help the company better address underserved markets. The company plans to double its headcount over the next year and launch a formal open source program office … y42 (formerly Datos Intelligence), a no-code business intelligence platform, today announces a seed round of $2.9 million, led by La Famiglia VC. Additional investors include the co-founders of Foodspring, Personio and Petlab … OctoML has closed a $28M million Series B funding round led by Addition and Lee Fixel with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Amplify Partners … Noogata, a leader in radically simple, no-code artificial intelligence (AI) data analytics for enterprises, announced that it has secured a $12 million seed funding led by Team8 with participation from Skylake Capital. Investment proceeds will power product development and organizational expansion to fast-track and scale Noogata’s innovative enterprise AI offering; support the company’s expansion into new industries; and serve existing customers, including Colgate and PepsiCo.
In M&A news we have … Tricentis, the testing platform for modern cloud and enterprise applications, announced the acquisition of Neotys, a leading performance testing company. As organizations grapple with the increased number of cloud-native, mobile, and enterprise packaged applications, the need for an integrated, end-to-end approach to test automation has never been greater. With this acquisition, Tricentis will further expand its AI-driven, end-to-end continuous testing platform to offer the most comprehensive testing solution to accelerate software delivery and innovation. Neotys’ flagship product, NeoLoad, will be added to the Tricentis portfolio, giving customers an enterprise-grade performance testing solution with the broadest coverage of enterprise packaged applications, including SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Workday … ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), a leading digital workflow company making work, work better for people, announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Intellibot, a robotic process automation (RPA) company based in Hyderabad, India. Intellibot extends ServiceNow’s core workflow capabilities by helping customers automate repetitive tasks for intelligent, end-to-end automation. ServiceNow intends to build Intellibot’s capabilities natively into the Now Platform to enable customers to more easily integrate with both modern and legacy systems to drive productivity and strengthen existing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) efforts … Instaclustr, delivering reliability at scale through fully managed open source data technologies, today announced that it has acquired Germany- and U.S.-based credativ. credativ provides a comprehensive suite of technical expertise, services, and support to ensure successful implementation, operation, and optimization of key open source data-layer technologies for business applications. In particular, credativ provides expertise and support for relational database PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Debian, and other solutions critical to a modern enterprise infrastructure. Like Instaclustr, credativ has deep experience driving customer data stack migration, automation, and cost optimization. Customers around the world rely on credativ’s services and active support to realize their IT goals through the use of powerful open source data-layer technologies. credativ adds to Instaclustr’s growing platform of open source software and services, which enable its 500+ customers across a wide range of industries to plan, build, and operate global-scale applications and solutions using the world’s leading open source technologies in their 100% open source versions.
In the new customer wins category we learned … MariaDB® Corporation announced that popular baseball analysis site FanGraphs has drafted MariaDB SkySQL as its cloud database running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and SkyDBA for first-string, 24x7x365 teammate firepower. With SkySQL, FanGraphs handles integrated statistics, projections, playoff odds models and complex queries with ease, speed and reliability. Leveraging the unparalleled expertise of dedicated SkyDBAs enables the FanGraphs team to fully focus on baseball and strategy … Datatron, a pioneer in AI ModelOps and governance at scale, announced that Domino’s®, the largest pizza company in the world based on retail sales, is harnessing its centralized platform to improve the performance of its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) efforts. Leveraging Datatron to automate and standardize the deployment, monitoring, management, governance, and validation of AI models developed in any environment, Domino’s is able to improve in-store operations, find untapped revenue opportunities, and provide customers with an even greater experience … Point Predictive, the AI company that increases trust in lending, announced that Ascent Funding, an award-winning education finance company, has adopted IncomePass to improve the lending experience for students and co-signers while adding a powerful risk management tool to its technology footprint. IncomePass allows Ascent Funding to reduce the time and resources required to fund new loans to borrowers when evaluating truthfulness and misrepresentation of income.
We also heard of some people movement news … Luminoso, the company that turns unstructured text data into business-critical insights, today announced Jeff Moyer as the company’s president and CEO … Massive Analytic, the fast-growing precognition AI company announced a range of senior hires as the company expands its leadership team to drive company growth, business development and innovation. These hires strengthen both the operations and product development of the business with the goal of improving the current market offerings to Massive Analytic’s customers while scaling the ability to deliver to its sector bases. Dr Grant Crow joins as the new Chief Operating Officer having previously held the COO role at HUMN.ai. Tacis Gavoyannis joins in a new role as Chief Growth Officer with a focus on expanding Massive Analytics’ customer base. Brian Boyer joins as the new SVP Commercial Operations. Henk Jansen joins as the new Director of Research & Innovation, with a remit to develop new leading-edge technologies in autonomous control and quantum computing … Sinequa, recognized by Gartner and Forrester as a leader in Enterprise Search, announced that it has appointed Bob Lewis as Senior Vice President (SVP) of its North America operations. As SVP, Lewis will drive continued and accelerated growth in North America … Confluent, Inc., the platform to set data in motion, welcomes two new leaders to the executive team. Cory Scott joins as chief information security officer (CISO) to help build and operate Confluent’s best-in-class security team. And Melanie Vinson joins the company as Confluent’s chief legal officer to lead the company’s legal function. The appointment of these executives will enable Confluent to scale its business and help empower more organizations to leverage the full power of data in motion … Yellowbrick Data, the modern data warehouse designed for unmatched performance and ultimate deployment flexibility, announced that Jonathan Reid has joined as the company’s Chief Revenue Officer. With more than 25 years of experience in driving effective growth strategies for start-up companies, Reid will focus on accelerating the adoption of Yellowbrick Data Warehouse within enterprises and commercial companies and building strong partnerships with Yellowbrick’s ecosystem of resellers and business partners … Dremio, the innovation leader in data lake transformation, announced the appointment of Robin Matlock to the Board of Directors and Anita Pandey as Chief Marketing Officer … Alation Inc., a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced the appointment of Steve Neat as its new Vice President of Sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Steve will address the ever-increasing demand for Alation in EMEA; develop new sales channels; and contribute to strategies that drive business value for Alation’s international customers … LinkSquares, provider of the top AI-powered contract lifecycle management and analysis tool, announced the appointment of Tim Parilla as the company’s Chief Legal Officer. Parilla has extensive experience leading legal operations in public and private companies in regulated markets. In his new role, he will oversee LinkSquares’ legal posture and act as strategic advisor to the company’s management and corporate counsel customer base. The company also expanded its board of directors with the addition of Bill Hewitt, CEO of Aternity and former CEO and Director of contract lifecycle management (CLM) software provider Exari.
In new partnerships, alignments and collaboration we learned … AVEVA, a global leader in engineering and industrial software, has joined forces with OSIsoft to meet the expanding information management needs of industrial companies and accelerate their digital transformation. The combined portfolio brings OSIsoft’s world-class data management together with AVEVA’s leading industrial software to unlock Performance Intelligence. Providing greater operational agility and resilience, Performance Intelligence connects information and artificial intelligence (AI) with human insight, to enable faster and more accurate decision making, helping industries boost sustainability. By pairing the trusted capabilities of OSIsoft’s PI System with the leading industrial software of AVEVA, Performance Intelligence gives the people behind essential processes the rich, reliable data they need to better measure and understand the entire industrial lifecycle. Areas where Performance Intelligence is likely to have the most impact will include organizational productivity, operational agility, and sustainability … Quantexa, the data and analytics software company pioneering Contextual Decision Intelligence, announced it has partnered with Deloitte as part of its global illicit finance and economic crime initiative, to enable the contextual monitoring of criminal activities. The move will help enterprises establish a robust framework against organized crime, and a powerful defense against the rise of illicit finance, economic crime and the fraud epidemic. Deloitte will utilize Quantexa’s Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI) platform to enable its clients to leverage technology and analytics as part of robust Economic Crime Governance and Risk Management Frameworks, to effectively monitor payment flows and gain a more accurate picture of the holistic risks presented from customers and associated third parties, legitimate and otherwise.
Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC. On March 30th, the USPTO added another 31 patents that use “deep learning,” “deep neural” or “multi-layer neural” in the Claims. The new patents raise the total to 296 patents during the first 3 months of 2021. At this rate, the total for 2021 will reach 1,184 patents, and well beyond the 726 patents issued in 2020.
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