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 start off with some new funding news … Vectra AI, a leader in threat detection and response announced a $130 million round of funding led by funds managed by Blackstone Growth (BXG, “Blackstone Growth”). The investment will help fuel Vectra’s continued growth through platform innovation and expansion into new markets and geographies, solidifying its Cognito platform as a market-leading solution for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven cloud security for threat detection and response. Existing investors also participated in the funding round, increasing the company’s total funding to more than $350 million at a post-money $1.2 billion valuation … TripleBlind announced that it expanded its collaboration with Mayo Clinic, which invested in a seed extension round, the only investor participating. TripleBlind recently announced that it raised $8.2 million in a significantly oversubscribed seed funding round. Mayo Clinic joins Accenture Ventures, Okta Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, Operator Partners, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, AVG Basecamp Fund, Anorak Ventures, Quiet Capital, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Parity Responsible Technology Fund and Manresa Ventures as a TripleBlind investor. TripleBlind is collaborating with Mayo Clinic on data-analysis, algorithm training and validation on one-way encrypted data and on next generation algorithm sharing. Mayo Clinic researchers are using TripleBlind’s tools to validate interoperability of encrypted algorithms on encrypted data and the training of new algorithms on private data … Arturo, an AI-powered platform that derives property insights and predictive analytics from aerial and satellite imagery, raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Atlantic Bridge Capital, with participation from RPS Ventures and existing investors Crosslink Capital and IAG Firemark Ventures – the venture capital fund for IAG, Australia’s largest general insurer … Kyligence, originator of Apache Kylin and the leader in intelligent data analytics, announced that the company has closed $70 million in Series D funding to continue powering its global expansion and rapid customer adoption, especially for the cloud business growth. This funding round attracted global investment management organizations, including the round’s lead investor, SPDB International. New investors Alpha Square Group, CICC, Gopher Asset Management, Shanghai Growth Capital, PUXIN Capital, and Jumbo Sheen Group also participated in the round. The round included follow-on investments from existing investors Redpoint, Eight Roads Ventures (the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International Limited) and Shunwei Capital … Tellius, the AI-driven decision intelligence platform, announced an $8 million Series A funding round led by Sands Capital Ventures with participation from Grotech Ventures—bringing the company’s total fundraising to-date to $17 million. The funds will be used to expand the company’s platform capabilities and support its mission of helping organizations get from data to decisions faster with intelligent automation … Section, a leading Edge as a Service (EaaS) provider, announced that it has closed $12 million in Series B funding. The financing round was led by Lumen Technologies, with additional participation from existing investors Foundry Group and Next Frontier Capital, and new investor Andreas Family Office. This latest influx of investment signals strong confidence in Section’s position within the potential $800 billion edge computing ecosystem … Unsupervised, a automated analytics platform, announced that it has closed a $35 million Series B round by new investors Cathay Innovation and SignalFire with participation from prior investors Coatue, Eniac Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners and Elad Gil … Aisera, the AI-driven platform that automates tasks, actions and workflows for employees and customers, announced that it has secured $40M in Series C funding. The round was led by Icon Ventures, with participation from new investor World Innovation Lab and existing investors True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Webb Investment Network, and Sherpalo. The company, which has now raised over $90M in total funding, intends to invest the capital for the continued rapid expansion and deployment of its AI-platform in enterprise IT, HR and customer service environments, as well as significant advancements in its go-to-market strategy, marketing and product development … Dataiku, one of the world’s leading AI and machine learning platforms, announced a new investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture arm of Snowflake. Together, Dataiku and Snowflake deliver enterprise-ready AI capabilities that enable customers to easily and quickly build, deploy and monitor all types of data science projects, including machine learning and deep learning … Era Software, the company that created EraDB to help enterprises manage hyperscale, cloud-native workloads, announced the close of a $15.25 million Series A round led by Playground Global. This brings total funding raised to over $22 million; Playground Global is joined in this round by existing investors Foundation Capital, Array Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and world-class angel investors. Era Software will use the capital raised to further accelerate product development, grow the team, and expand use cases. The company also today announced a private beta of its EraSearch Cloud product to bring its transformational log management technology to organizations as a managed service. Prior to its Series A, Era Software was known as EraDB, which will remain the moniker for the company’s novel time-series architecture … Actuate, a leading provider of automation and intelligence software for smart security camera systems, announced it has closed its Series A financing of $8 million to expand the capabilities of its computer vision technology and build on the company’s growing portfolio of customers. The funding round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and joined by Scribble Ventures, OCA Ventures, and Context Ventures, with additional support from existing investors, including Bling Capital, Upside Partnership, and Tensility Venture Partners.
In M&A news we learned … DeepCube, the award-winning deep learning pioneer, has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Nano Dimension Ltd. (Nasdaq: NNDM). After the closing of the transaction, DeepCube will function as a division of Nano Dimension Ltd., creating first-of-its-kind, AI powered-Additively Manufactured Electronics (AME)/PE (3D-Printed Electronics) platforms and services. DeepCube’s training platform and real-time inference engine will be integrated into Nano Dimension AME 3D-printers, acting as smart nodes in a Smart Fabrication Network (SFN), as well as being the AI control center for these networks. With DeepCube’s expertise in machine learning/deep learning, the vision of Industry 4.0 – where machines cooperate, learn, optimize and deliver printed electronics – is now achievable … Kenshoo, a global leader in marketing technology, announced its acquisition of Signals Analytics, a pioneer in AI-powered analytics and consumer insights. Providing Kenshoo clients with full-circle marketing intelligence, the acquisition allows Kenshoo to help brands solve critical challenges including how to catch up with accelerated e-commerce adoption, and be best positioned to predict go-to-market outcomes as well as understand, engage and transact with consumers regardless of channel.
In the new partnerships, alignments and collaborations arena we learned … Anaconda and HP announced a deepened collaboration that will further support the data science community. Anaconda is fully integrated into the Z by HP for Data Science product line as part of the preloaded software stack, with additional future opportunities to collaborate in areas like community programming, such as with HP’s Data Science Ambassador program … Moogsoft, the AI-driven observability leader, announced a strategic partnership with HCL Technologies (HCL), a global technology company that empowers organizations for the next decade today. The partnership will deliver an end-to-end solution for automated remediation of IT incidents and help assure business service continuity and customer experience innovation in today’s digital economy. The two companies will develop and deliver a joint solution combining the Moogsoft Observability Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven anomaly detection and correlation with automated remediation capabilities from HCL’s DRYiCE™ iAutomate. This offering drastically reduces support costs while increasing operational efficiency and the frequency of DevOps CI/CD … Airbiquity®, a global leader in connected vehicle services announced the expansion of a multi-year technology collaboration with NXP Semiconductors to pre-integrate and demonstrate efficient, secure, and highly scalable automotive software updates and data management for intelligent connected vehicles. The latest integration effort between the two companies showcases essential vehicle-wide support for evolving software-defined vehicles using Airbiquity over-the-air (OTA) software update and data management services, a NXP service-oriented gateway serving as the primary ECU, and additional NXP automotive processing platforms serving as secondary domain ECUs … GridGain® Systems, provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions powered by the Apache® Ignite® distributed database, announced it is partnering with Intel to deliver the industry’s first in-memory computing platform to natively support vectorized computations over Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series (PMem). Early testing of the PMem support suggests GridGain Platform users can achieve an extraordinary performance increase for high-performance computing, analytics and machine learning workloads … Diveplane, the company keeping humanity in artificial intelligence (AI), and the UK based Healthcare consultancy Tektology, announced that they have entered into a new partnership. Through this alliance, Tektology will leverage the Diveplane AI based GEMINAI™ technology for patient-focused global projects … Stateless, Inc., the company putting data back in motion, and PacketFabric, the leading provider of on-demand connectivity for hybrid and multi-cloud IT, announced a partnership to unlock the value of network automation for data science and warehousing workflows. As hybrid and multi-cloud workflows become a mainstay for data science applications, agility and control of the data transport between those clouds becomes crucial to ensure data security, performance, and business continuity. Stateless and PacketFabric have come together to give data science teams more control over hybrid and multi-cloud data workflows. This joint solution provides point-and-click setup and configuration of the secure data transport needed to move data between data centers, application clouds, branch offices, edge data aggregation sites and more … Amsterdam-based smart home company Gamgee, and Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced a partnership to develop machine learning algorithms that enable seamless identification of multi-vendor IoT devices to better protect and integrate diverse systems. The two parties aim to develop a technology that overcomes MAC address randomization for identification purposes while maintaining high standards of data privacy … Monte Carlo, the data reliability company, announced a partnership with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to help data teams trust their data and accelerate the adoption of analytics in the Data Cloud. This combination can provide Snowflake customers with end-to-end Data Observability across their entire Snowflake Data Cloud, from ingestion to analytics. Monte Carlo is an end-to-end solution that allows data engineers and analysts to seamlessly monitor the health and dependencies of their data assets across the entire Data Cloud, from ingestion to analytics – all in one collaborative interface. Simultaneously, Monte Carlo provides CDOs and other data stakeholders with a holistic view of their company’s data health and reliability across critical business use cases … Dgraph Labs (“Dgraph”), the open source graph database, announced its partnership with UK-based integration and analytics consulting company Capventis to expand the data unification of global brands. The partnership will extend Dgraph’s reach as Capventis leverages its integration options with key clients in the UK and Europe.
In people movement news we heard … CData Software, a leading provider of standards-based drivers and data access solutions for real-time data integration, announced the appointment of Matt Webb as Chief Financial Officer. Webb adds a unique blend of technology leadership, financial expertise, and operational experience to CData’s accomplished executive team. He has previously driven finance and strategic initiatives in several financial leadership roles, most recently for Devada, as well as MaxPoint, Valassis Digital (after it acquired MaxPoint), and healthcare software company, M*Model … Brightflag, the AI-powered enterprise legal management platform, announced the appointment of legal technology veteran Barry O’Melia as the company’s new Vice President of Product. O’Melia will align Brightflag’s product vision, customers’ emerging requirements, and his own industry perspective to deliver easy-to-use innovations that offer practical value to corporate legal departments … Reltio, an award-winning provider of the first master data management (MDM) software as a service (SaaS) platform born in the cloud and used by companies worldwide to succeed in the digital economy, announced that Chris Battles has joined the company in the newly-created role of Chief Customer Officer … AHEAD, a leading provider of platforms for digital business, announced the appointment of Dell veteran Tony Coffey as Chief Operating Officer. In this role, Coffey will be responsible for scaling AHEAD’s operations to meet the demands of a fast-growing organization … DataRobot, a leader in enterprise AI, announcedit has named Haniyeh Mahmoudian, Ph.D., as its new Global AI Ethicist, a role created to further the company’s mission to build and deliver trustworthy and ethical AI systems. Mahmoudian, an astrophysicist by training, previously served as a data science researcher for DataRobot, focusing on privacy, bias, trust, and ethics in AI. In her new role, she will lead the new DataRobot Applied AI Ethics Team, which will support thought leadership in AI ethics and create trusted technical resources and governance frameworks for DataRobot’s stakeholders.
In the new customer wins departments we have … Infinidat, a leading provider of enterprise-class storage solutions, announced that OFFSITE, a national provider of hosted, managed services and data center operations based in Wisconsin, selected Infinidat’s storage technology to support the growth of its business. Infinidat’s storage technology displaced the existing all-flash arrays that OFFSITE had been using to meet the enterprise technology requirements of its customers … Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the connected multi-cloud data platform company, announced that Groupon is moving its on-premises data warehouse to Teradata Vantage in the cloud – delivered as-a-service, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Continuing its established relationship with Teradata, Groupon selected the company’s cloud offering to modernize their data analytics ecosystem so they can focus their resources on creating business value, rather than managing IT infrastructure … Datadobi, a leader in unstructured data management software, announced that Endeavor Energy Resources, L.P. (“Endeavor”), a premier exploration and production (E&P) company, and one of the largest private oil producers in the United States of America, has selected DobiMigrate to enable and accelerate the move of Endeavor’s production workflows to a new, modern colocation facility … StorCentric, a global enterprise leader in data management and reliable storage solutions, announced that Cloud Propeller, a leading provider of enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure solutions has deployed Violin All-Flash NVMe storage to ensure the performance, reliability, and affordability of its public cloud services. In addition, StorCentric also announced today that having experienced Violin storage for themselves, Cloud Propeller will now be offering the Violin QV-Series to end customers.
Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC. After 16 weeks in 2021, the number of “deep learning” patents is 381. At the current pace per week, the count is only one week away from the number of patents in the entire year of 2019 (396). At this rate, the projected total for 2021 is 1,257 patents, which is strong growth from 2020, when the total was 726.
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