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.
Welcome back for another edition of our industry gossip central! Let’s commence with some new funding news … Comet, provider of the development platform for enterprise machine learning (ML) teams, announced it has raised $50 million in a series B funding round, led by OpenView, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Trilogy Equity Partners and Two Sigma Ventures. In addition, Ofer Bengal, Founder and CEO of Redis, and Dr. Oren Etzioni, CEO at AI2, have joined Comet as strategic advisors to support the company’s mission of empowering AI builders to accelerate ML-driven business outcomes and advance data science. Funding comes amid significant product development milestones, company momentum and customer wins … Alluxio, the developer of open source data orchestration software for large-scale analytics and AI/ML workloads, announced Series C financing of $50 million led by a leading global investment firm, along with participation from existing investors including a16z, Seven Seas Partners, and Volcanics Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised to date to more than $70 million … WSO2, the leader in digital transformation technology, announced that the company has closed $90 million in financing from client vehicles advised by Goldman Sachs Asset Management Private Credit (“Goldman Sachs”). The flexible capital solution will be used to accelerate WSO2’s worldwide business expansion, drive growth of the company’s global partner network, and support rollout of its next-generation, cloud-native solutions for securely delivering APIs, applications, and digital services. The new solutions, powered by Ballerina, will offer a seamless blend of low code and pro code experience for enterprises and deliver the power of DevOps and modern SDLC practices including integrated reuse within the organization and beyond … ThoughtSpot, the Modern Analytics Cloud company, announced that it raised a $100M Series F funding round at a new $4.2B valuation, more than doubling the company’s previous valuation and bringing the company’s total funding to $674M. The round was led by new investor March Capital and joined by existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Fidelity, Capital One Ventures, General Catalyst, Sapphire Ventures, and GIC … Mantium launched with the GA beta release of its cloud platform for building with large language models and managing them at scale. Mantium is setting a new standard for the accessibility of AI. As of launch, the platform powers innovative applications built with the world’s leading AI providers including OpenAI, EleutherAI, AI21 and Cohere with more, such as Hugging Face, expected to be added soon. Mantium also announced today their $12.75M seed funding co-led by Drive Capital and Top Harvest … Zesty, a provider of AI-driven cloud management technologies for real-time optimization, announced a $35 million Series A funding round led by Next47. Joining the round as new investors are Sapphire Ventures and Samsung Next, with participation from returning investor S-Capital. Zesty has now raised $42 million in total since its founding in 2019 … mimik Technology, Inc., a pioneer in hybrid edge cloud technology and business solutions, announced a $14.3 million Series A funding round led by Pier 88 Investment Partners, a San Francisco-based alternative investment management firm. Other participants include Cathie Wood, Founder, CIO and CEO of ARK Invest and member of the mimik Board of Directors, and TTB Partners, along with existing investors Primera Capital and NLabs. mimik plans to use the funds to expand its global go-to-market operations including sales, solutions delivery, developer outreach, technical training, and partnership development … Supergrain, the headless BI company, announced it has raised $6.8 million in a seed funding round led by Benchmark with participation from Base Case Capital and Operator Collective, and launched the public beta of its new platform for modern data teams … Inovia Capital led an extension to increase Neo4j‘s recent Series F funding round to $390 million – the largest investment in a private database company. New investor Alanda Capital Management and One Peak (an investor since 2018) also participated in the Series F extension … VergeSense, a leader in AI-powered workplace analytics, announced it has raised $60 million in Series C funding, led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from DivcoWest and existing investors Tola Capital, JLL Spark, MetaProp, Allegion Ventures and Bolt. This investment will help the company accelerate platform innovation and growth as the market increasingly requires data and insights to drive necessary workplace transformation … WhyLabs, a leading provider of observability for AI and data applications announced the close of a $10 million Series A co-led by Defy Partners and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, with participation from existing investors including Madrona Venture Group and Bezos Expeditions. The company will use the investment to meet growing demand, expand platform capabilities, scale operations and continue building its world-class team … Yellowbrick Data, an innovation leader in modern data warehousing, announced it has closed a Series C1 funding of $75M while accelerating growth in sales of its cloud data warehouse. Yellowbrick continues to add large companies in financial services, hedge funds, and insurance as customers, adding to a diversified customer base of companies across many industries including telecom, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. The company is on track to more than double its ending ARR business with this year’s bookings, while seeing its customer net retention rate approach 150%, a strong indication that once customers start using Yellowbrick, they tend to quickly deploy more … Reltio, the cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) data platform that accelerates data value for businesses, announced it has secured $120 million in funding led by investment firm Brighton Park Capital (“Brighton Park”), with participation from existing investors Crosslink Capital, NewView Capital, RPS Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and .406 Ventures. To date, Reltio has raised $237 million in total funding and is valued at approximately $1.7 billion. The new capital will help to fuel Reltio’s growth strategies, expand global go-to-market, and further scale the company’s efforts to deliver industry-leading products … MindsDB, the open-source machine learning (ML) startup that brings ML to the database, announced an investment from Walden Catalyst Ventures, closing out MindsDB’s total seed round to $7.6M. Walden Catalyst Ventures joins YCombinator, OpenOcean (the venture fund launched by the creators of MySQL and MariaDB), SpeedInvest, and the University of California Berkeley SkyDeck fund. MindsDB’s mission is to democratize ML by giving enterprise databases “a brain”, driving better, data-driven business decisions without enterprises needing to become AI developers or experts … Datafold, a data reliability platform that automates the most tedious parts of data engineering workflows, announced its successful $20 million Series A funding round. Backed by NEA and Amplify Partners, Datafold seeks to expand its proactive approach to data reliability to help companies unlock more growth using high-quality data … Treasure Data, a leading enterprise customer data platform (CDP), announced it has secured $234 million in funding, becoming the largest-ever single funding round for a CDP. The investment is led by SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434), the Japan-based operating company, with participation from Carbide Ventures, an investment firm founded by Treasure Data founders and long-time executives. The new capital will be used to execute on CDP innovation and accelerate global growth … OTA Insight, a leader in cloud-based hospitality business intelligence, has raised $80 million from Spectrum Equity, a leading growth equity firm focused on internet-enabled software and transformational data companies. Spectrum Equity joins existing OTA Insight investors Eight Roads, F-Prime Capital and Highgate Technology Ventures. This latest investment will support the company in furthering its mission to enable smarter commercial decisions and outputs across the industry as it expands its global footprint … Lumigo, a leading cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform, announced $29M in new funding, the largest ever investment in the world of serverless. The Series A round brings Lumigo’s total funding to $37M, and was led by RedLine Capital, with the participation of Wing Venture Capital, Vertex Ventures US in addition to existing investors Pitango First, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital. Lumigo, which began by focusing on automated distributed tracing for serverless cloud services like API Gateway, DynamoDB, Kinesys, S3 and Lambda, also announced the expansion of its SaaS observability product to containers, Kubernetes and Virtual Machines … Sama, the AI company delivering accurate data for ambitious AI to Fortune 2000 companies, announced an oversubscribed $70 million in Series B financing led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a global investment group, with participation from First Ascent Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Vistara Growth, in addition to all existing investors.
In M&A activity, we have Anodot, the business monitoring company, announced the acquisition of Pileus , a cloud cost management platform for an undisclosed amount. The combined offering, powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, will enable businesses to proactively manage and forecast their cloud costs … Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DNB), a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, announced that it has entered into definitive agreements to acquire Eyeota and NetWise. These acquisitions will extend the Company’s position in the B2B online marketing value chain and will build upon its rapidly growing Audience Solutions business by adding global scale and the online data to power omni-channel marketing around the world … DataCore Software, a pioneer in and the largest independent vendor of Software-Defined Storage solutions, announced it will acquire MayaData, the original developer of OpenEBS and developer of MayaStor. The move follows a joint venture between the two companies in January 2020 that included funding, technology licensing, transfer of the DataCore container team to MayaData, and seats on the board of director for DataCore’s CEO and primary investors. MayaData and its entire San Jose CA-based team become part of DataCore. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In the new partnerships, alignments and collaborations department we have … Domino Data Lab, provider of a leading Enterprise MLOps platform trusted by over 20% of the Fortune 100, announced a new fully managed offering from solution partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that leverages the Domino platform to easily and cost-effectively run high-performance computing and data science workloads on NVIDIA DGXTM systems, all in the TCS Enterprise Cloud. Along with the coming integration of Domino’s platform with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, this represents a pivotal next phase of collaboration between Domino, NVIDIA and TCS to help make every company model-driven … Speedb, the drop-in embeddable solution compliant with RocksDB storage engines, announced a strategic alliance with Redis, a leading real-time data platform. Speedb’s enterprise-grade data engine technology will now be offered by Redis to their more than 8,000 customers as an option to support the largest deployments for Redis on Flash use cases. With Speedb as the data engine, Redis on Flash can generate up to double throughput, with half the latency, and double the capacity as compared to the same deployment with the RocksDB storage engine. Most importantly, when deployed with Speedb, Redis on Flash provides faster performance while remaining cost-efficient as a customer’s data set grows … Kontron, a leading global provider of IoT/Embedded Computing Technology (ECT), announced it has forged a strategic technology partnership with leading AI (Artificial Intelligence) chipmaker Hailo to offer next generation AI edge inference solutions. The advanced Hailo-8™ AI processor, performing at 26 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at a typical power consumption of less than 2.5 watts, enables edge devices to run at performance levels previously only possible in the cloud. The strategic collaboration offers customers a new level of high-performance, scalable AI-edge application-ready platforms for a wide range of market segments such as Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart retail and more … Datavid, a data intelligence start-up, and Graphifi, a knowledge graph solutions start-up, announced their partnership to provide better data solutions across key industry verticals. The synergies from this joined up approach will increase customer value. New tools will provide better insights from data. An example is the creation of business vocabularies Graphifi’s Graphologi product and their use to extract and auto classify data in Datavid’s entity extraction platform: Datavid Rover … Anodot, the autonomous business monitoring company, announced a technology partnership with Rivery, the end-to-end DataOps platform, to help digital advertisers monitor marketing campaign anomalies. The partnership leverages Rivery’s no-code pipelines to push data to Anodot for real-time monitoring … The Swedish software company Zebware and Wasabi Technologies, the hot cloud storage company, join forces to enable low-cost, scalable, and ultra-performant cloud-based data lakes. Zebware’s cloud data memory bridge, ZebClient, delivers an outstanding boost to cloud data access speeds. ZebClient uniquely disaggregates storage from compute and maximizes the utilization of local persistent memory to provide an exceptional performance where up to 500 times faster access speeds were demonstrated in tests performed at Intel’s 5G Innovation Center in Stockholm, Sweden. Wasabi provides low-cost, fast, and reliable cloud storage on- demand. Its high-performance storage is 80% less expensive than traditional cloud providers with no fees for egress or API requests. The combination of ZebClient and Wasabi cloud storage is a perfect match for data lakes as data access speeds, availability and scalability are all significantly accelerated.
In the new customer wins category we learned … Denodo, a leader in data virtualization, announced that its customer, City Furniture, has completed an enterprise-wide digital transformation where data science and advanced analytics has become the foundation for the company’s new digital business model. Underpinned by the Denodo Platform, the fast growing retail company was able to virtualize all its data sources and create a semantic layer to connect and deliver critical data to its marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, and merchandising functions and grow the business beyond the borders of Florida … Netradyne, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing focusing on driver and fleet safety, announced North Little Rock, AR based Oakley Trucking, Inc., a complete dry bulk transportation company with operations in 48 States and Canada, has selected Netradyne’s Driveri® video devices to be installed across its entire fleet. The decision was made after a competitive review and pilot program. Concurrent to the Driveri rollout, Oakley will also be deploying the Geotab ELD solution provided by Authorized Geotab Reseller and Netradyne partner, Transflo … GigaSpaces Technologies, a leading provider of Digital Integration Hub (“DIH”) software solutions that enable large enterprises to expedite and scale the delivery of online, customer facing applications, announced that its Smart DIH solution was chosen by Leumi Bank to power its digital innovation.
In people movement news, we heard … Imply, the popular database for modern analytics applications, announced the appointment of Eric Tschetter as field chief technology officer (CTO). This addition to the company’s executive management team brings together the power of all four original creators of Apache Druid® to realize a shared vision at Imply for creating a complete, integrated architecture for modern analytics applications … StrongBox Data Solutions (SBDS), a leading provider of autonomous large-scale data management and archive solutions, announced the appointment of Andrew Hall as chief executive officer (CEO) to lead the growth and transition of the company as it expands the market presence of StrongLink, the company’s flagship product … CAIS, a leading alternative investment platform, announced that George Davies, Ph.D., has joined CAIS as its new Head of Data. Based in the Company’s New York office, Davies will report to Shane Williams, Chief Technology Officer … SupportLogic, the proactive Support Experience (SX) platform, announced the appointments of Nick Tarnoff as VP of Finance and Liz Bronson as VP of People … Protegrity, a global leader in data security, announced the appointment of Paul Mountford as the company’s new CEO. Mountford joins Protegrity following a successful 30-year career in the technology industry, having held senior executive positions at industry-leading companies such as Cisco Systems, where Mountford ran Cisco’s $34 billion Enterprise business, and Riverbed Technology where Mountford was CEO. Most recently, Mountford served as chief operating officer at Pure Storage, one of the fastest growing enterprise IT companies that provides storage solutions for SaaS and cloud companies to power mission-critical artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and analytics in multi cloud environments … SingleStore, the single database for all data-intensive applications, announced that Henock Gessesse has joined the company as general counsel. Mr. Gessesse will contribute his significant business and legal expertise to SingleStore, which added the general counsel position to provide more fuel to its already rapidly growing operation … Ambiq announced that Carlos Morales has joined the company as Vice President of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Mr. Morales will leverage Ambiq’s Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT™) platform to bring AI to the farthest endpoints of compute as billions of mobile, and portable devices continue to expand the ever-growing IoT universe. He will focus on enabling novel low-latency AI-driven applications while reducing the need for intensive energy demand by applying analytics locally and intelligently … Gurobi Optimization, LLC, creator of the mathematical optimization solver, announced the appointment of Duke Perrucci as Chief Operating Officer. Perrucci, who has served as Gurobi’s Chief Revenue Officer since early 2018, has helped lead the company on an upward trajectory, with steady and profitable growth between 20%-40% year over year. The company has also greatly expanded its workforce in that time and plans to continue that growth in 2022.As Chief Operating Officer, Perrucci will continue to work closely with the senior management team, but he will now oversee strategy execution across the organization … Talend, a global leader in data integration and data integrity, announced two new appointments to its executive leadership team. The company has named Robert Purcell its next Chief Financial Officer and Jeff Lambert its first Chief Legal Officer … Sumo Logic, (Nasdaq: SUMO), the pioneer in continuous intelligence, announced the appointment of Lynne Doherty to the newly formed role of President, Worldwide Field Operations, effective immediately.
Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC.
Join us on Twitter: @InsideBigData1 – https://twitter.com/InsideBigData1
Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.
Being an intern in M&A, I am always concerned about any rumor about this company. And while searching, I found your article with some crucial information on extending our company’s position in the B2B online marketing chain value. Thanks for your information.