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.
So much to report since our last round-up, so let’s begin with some new funding news … Imply Data, Inc., the company founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, announced its $100 million Series D financing, which values the company at $1.1 billion. This investment round was led by Thoma Bravo with participation from OMERS Growth Equity, both new investors. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Funds, Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures also participated in the financing. This round brings Imply’s total funding raised to date to $215 million as the company accelerates to meet the growing need for modern analytics applications … Credo AI, the company behind the Responsible AI (RAI) Governance Platform, announced the close of a $12.8 million Series A financing round led by Sands Capital, with follow-on investments from existing investors Decibel and AI Fund … Panzura LLC, a leader in hybrid multi-cloud data management, raised $80 million in Series B funding from Kayne Partners, the growth private equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, and funding from CIBC Innovation Banking … Humanitas Technologies, the impact data infrastructure startup that is building a universal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) API or “Grammarly for DEI”, announced they’ve secured $1.5M in seed funding. Strategic investors include Francoise Brougher, Jeff Walker, Mark Tercek, and founders and executives from FiscalNote, Mammoth Biosciences, Cymantix, Google AI, Expedia, Meta, and more. The funds will enable Humanitas to expand engineering capacities to continue building upon its mission of counteracting an increasingly sexist and racist internet … SingularityNET and SingularityDAO secured a $25 million commitment with Global investment group LDA Capital Limited, to accelerate product roadmap, adoption of AI tools and scaling the ecosystem while supporting the growth of decentralized AI in general and its use in decentralized finance … Bitfount, the federated analytics and machine learning platform, announced that it has raised a $5M seed round as it continues to accelerate its product development and expand its engineering and design teams with key hires. The round, led by Ahren and Speedinvest, reflects the growing global demand for machine learning and analytics in every industry, alongside increased public and regulatory awareness of data privacy concerns, and the rise of the data-centric AI movement … Aiven, a software company that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced it raised $210M in its Series D at a pre-money valuation of $3B. The round was led by Eurazeo, and joined by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock as well as existing investors IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, World Innovation Lab and Salesforce Ventures … Cogniteam, a robotics development company that recently launched the Nimbus robotics AI operating platform, announced the closing of a $5.6 million in series A. The round of funding comprised the previous investors of Seabarn Management, (Andrew Owens) and UK-based Panthera family office members. This round enables Cogniteam to boost product development and Nimbus sales further as the robotics revolution continues to show both consumer and commercial demand … Wyebot, a leader in AI-driven WiFi automation, announced it has closed an $8 million Series A funding round to further commercialize its industry-leading Wireless Intelligence Platform (WIP) and meet expanding market demands across industries including the distributed enterprise, education, healthcare, manufacturing and warehousing. Stage 1 Ventures led the funding round, while existing investors Tectonic Ventures, Innospark Ventures and Launch Capital also participated … Pyramid Analytics (Pyramid), a pioneering decision intelligence platform provider – next-generation business analytics for the enterprise – announced that it has closed a Series E funding round of $120 million, bringing the company’s total venture capital raise to more than $200 million. The round was led by H.I.G. Growth Partners, the dedicated growth capital investment affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, a leading global alternative investment firm with over $48 billion of equity capital under management1, with the participation of Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings, Kingfisher Capital, and General Oriental Investments. Early investors who participated in this new round are JVP, Maor Investments, Sequoia Capital, and Viola Growth … BalkanID announced $5.75 million in seed funding and the launch of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution. Delivering first-to-market functionality, BalkanID’s solution leverages artificial intelligence and workflow automation to provide visibility into risky entitlements and simplify the access review and certification process. By helping organizations find and fix problematic entitlements across their SaaS and cloud landscape, BalkanID enables IT and security teams to integrate the principle of least privilege into security and IT operations … OtterTune, the database automation and optimization platform, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital and Race Capital with participation from Accel. Nick Washburn, Senior Managing Director of Intel Capital, will help accelerate the company’s growth by joining its board of directors.
In new partnerships, alignments and collaborations we learned … HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company with a strong legacy of SAP innovation, announced a strategic partnership with Syniti. This collaboration with Syniti, a global leader in enterprise data management that combines AI-driven software and data expertise, will help develop industry-specific data solutions and deliver higher quality SAP S/4HANA transformations. HCL Technologies will adopt the Syniti Knowledge Platform(SKP) as its strategic data migration platform to provide customers with improved data management strategy and higher quality data. SKP will also help deliver a complete data quality assessment and migration service across working and staging environments, ensuring quality data is securely and efficiently migrated from legacy systems to new SAP solutions … alwaysAI, a computer vision platform leader, and Hailo, a leading AI processor for edge devices, have partnered to deliver accelerated computer vision applications on edge devices for their growing enterprise customer base. This partnership allows developers to easily take advantage of Hailo’s high-performance, low-power product using the seamless alwaysAI platform. Sectors that will benefit from this powerful solution include smart retail, industry 4.0, and transportation … InsightOut, a data analytics and management platform from Treehouse Technology Group, announced a partnership with Sage, the leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The partnership will enable InsightOut to integrate with the Sage Intacct cloud financial management system, helping customers achieve a centralized single source of truth for reporting analytics … Yseop, a leading AI software company and pioneer in Natural Language Processing (NLP), announced a strategic collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company. This collaboration allows Lilly to deploy Yseop’s world-class enterprise automation platform, Augmented Analyst, to accelerate bringing Lilly’s medicines to patients … Tellius announced a partnership with Indegene, a technology-led healthcare solutions provider. The partnership will combine Tellius’ AI-driven decision intelligence platform with Indegene’s deep healthcare domain knowledge and advanced data and analytics expertise, enabling companies to drive faster and better business decisions that elevate patient journeys … ITHENA, a global technology company specializing in Digital Transformation Services & Solutions, announced its partnership with Incorta – the Direct Data Platform – for enterprises to import and analyze data with unparalleled speed and agility from every corner of their enterprise … Immuta, a leading provider of data access and data security, today announced an expanded partnership with Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, to address growing data access control and security demands for modern data architectures. The Immuta plugin, now shipping with every Starburst Enterprise instance, allows seamless integration with a customer’s Immuta installation. The partnership enables organizations to maximize the power and flexibility of data mesh architectures with fast, secure data access.
In people movement new we heard … Domino Data Lab announced it has added MLOps experts from two of the biggest brands in enterprise tech to its team. Chris Lauren has joined Domino as vice president, product from Microsoft, where he led the Azure Machine Learning product team; and Kjell Carlsson, Ph.D., a former Forrester analyst, has joined the company as head of data science strategy & evangelism … Query.AI, the provider of the security investigations control plane for modern enterprises, announced the appointment of Jeremy Fisher as chief technology officer (CTO). Fisher joins Query.AI with extensive technology and cybersecurity experience, as well as a proven track record of transforming business operations; developing, launching, and scaling first-in-class enterprise solutions that achieve desired outcomes; and building and retaining high-performing teams … SnapLogic, a leader in Enterprise Automation, announced that it has named Jeremiah Stone the company’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Jeremiah is an experienced builder of advanced technology products and platforms that leverage the full power of AI to solve real business problems. He will be responsible for guiding the continued development and future direction of SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform – with industry-leading AI and machine learning at its core – enabling customers to further speed the integration and automation process to drive breakthrough business results … AI and data analytics provider Dataiku announced the hiring of former DataRobot executive Abhi Madhugiri as its new VP of Technology Alliances. An industry veteran with more than 15 years of technology business experience, Abhi led Cloud alliances both at DataRobot and AppDynamics prior to joining Dataiku. He will be responsible for driving the company’s go-to-market strategy for cloud partnerships and continuing to accelerate Dataiku’s Snowflake go-to-market plan … Hazelcast, Inc., home of the real-time data platform, announced the hiring of Karen Smith as Chief Revenue Officer and Tamzyn Furse as Chief People Officer. These additions to the Hazelcast leadership team are focused on accelerating the company’s rapid rise and continued growth by enabling the real-time economy … Transposit, the company that delivers connected workflow for DevOps, announced that Bojan (Boki) Beran joined as VP of Engineering. Boki most recently spent five years at ServiceNow, where he reported to the SVP of platform engineering and helped define the platform strategy for the company. At Transposit, he will leverage his domain knowledge in process automation and enterprise technology to lead product direction, oversee the engineering and operations teams, and grow Transposit’s engineering team with top talent … SQream Technologies, a leading Peta-scale data analytics platform announced the appointment of Naama Saar as Chief Operating Officer, responsible for executing the company’s strategy and vision to become the market leader for solutions that accelerate Peta size data analytics. Naama will lead the product, R&D and delivery teams worldwide to provide a superior customer experience for their partners and customers … – Neo4j®, a leading graph data platform, announced that Chandra Rangan has joined the company’s executive management team as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Rangan joins Neo4j from Google, where he ran Google Cloud Platform product marketing and more recently, product-led growth, strategy, and operations for Google Maps Platform. His career spans two decades of technology infrastructure experience across marketing leadership, strategy, and operations at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Symantec, Gartner, McKinsey, and IBM … Vic.ai, the artificial intelligence (AI) platform for autonomous accounting and real-time insights, announced the appointment of seasoned enterprise technology executive Aditi Charnoubi as Chief Growth Officer. Recognized for incubating and scaling emerging technology platforms, bolstering sales and strategic partnerships, and building verticals for enterprise and public sectors globally, Charnoubi will work alongside Vic.ai CEO Alexander Hagerup to drive strategic growth for the finance-focused AI software company … Push Technology, a pioneer and leader in real-time data streaming and messaging solutions, has announced the appointment of Riaz Mohammed as its new CTO. Riaz has extensive experience in a variety of industries including Banking and Finance, Utilities, Transportation, Automotive, and Government.
In the customer wins category we have … DDN®, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and multicloud data management solutions, announced that NEC Corporation (NEC) has selected DDN storage for its new supercomputer dedicated to AI research.With a raw compute performance of 580 PFLOPS, the new research supercomputer will provide data scientists at NEC with access to the largest AI-focused development environment in the industry in Japan and assist in the rapid development of advanced AI … Spitch, a global one-stop shop vendor for conversational AI enterprise solutions, was chosen by Reale Group to increase the efficiency of its customer service. Spitch developed a solution, where Virtual Assistant is seamlessly connected to the Knowledge Base, answers most standard questions that are usually directed by junior operators to their superiors in a fully automated manner … MemVerge™, a pioneer of Big Memory software, announced that SeekGene, a biotechnology research firm focusing on single-cell technology, has significantly reduced processing time and cost for data intensive single-cell analysis tasks using MemVerge Memory Machine running on AliCloud i4p compute instances. As a result, SeekGene is seeing a five-fold increase in output per virtual machine (VM) in its analytical operations. In particular, the data loading and exporting performance of its single cell sequencing pipeline has improved by two orders of magnitude, and it has doubled the sample size of the dataset used in the analyses … PIPA LLC announced that it has entered into a multi-year agreement with Mars, Incorporated to accelerate the discovery of new, plant-based ingredients. PIPA’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, LEAP™, will leverage biomedical databases and innovation pipelines to provide Mars with unique capabilities for designing new products to address growing consumer demand for health benefits from foods, beverages and dietary supplements. PIPA is an Artificial Intelligence company dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery in the service of innovation and commercialization of products and services at the interface of food, nutrition and health.
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