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 under way with some new funding news … MANTA, the data lineage platform, announced it has raised $35 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Forestay Capital, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, SAP.io, Senovo, Credo Ventures, Dan Fougere, and new investor European Bank for Reconstruction and Development … Basetwo, a SaaS AI platform for manufacturers, announced it secured a $3.8M seed round led by Glasswing Ventures and Argon Ventures with additional funding from Caffeinated Capital, Graphite Ventures, MaRs IAF, Pareto Holdings, Plug and Play, and Quiet Capital … Idiomatic, a proven customer intelligence innovator, announced the close of a $4 million seed round led by Freestyle. Translating customer feedback into easily understandable insights so companies can make better product and customer service decisions to improve customer experience, Idiomatic helps top digital-native brands such as FabFitFun, Facebook, Instacart, Pinterest, Medium, Upwork, HubSpot and more drive dramatic gains in customer growth and loyalty … WSO2, a leader in digital transformation technology, announced that the company has completed its Series E funding round with the addition of RedStart Labs (India), a subsidiary of Info Edge Limited (NSE: NAUKRI). The move brings the total growth capital raised to $93 million. Info Edge joins lead investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management Private Credit (“Goldman Sachs”), which completed the first tranche of the Series E in November 2021. Info Edge, through its RedStart subsidiary, will contribute strategically to WSO2’s accelerated business expansion across India … Cribl, a leader in enabling open observability, announced it raised $150 million in new Series D funding led by Tiger Global Management, and joined by existing investors CRV, IVP, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Greylock Partners. Secured less than a year after its Series C round last summer, the Series D funding brings Cribl’s total funding to $400 million, validating the growing role observability data plays in driving business outcomes … Monte Carlo, the data reliability company, announced they have raised $135M in Series D funding from IVP with participation from Accel, GGV Capital, Redpoint Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, and GIC Singapore. With this round, Monte Carlo has raised a total of $236M in a 20-month period, most recently announcing their Series C in August 2021 and a suite of new product functionalities to help data teams. Monte Carlo intends to use the capital infusion to continue improving experiences for its hundreds of customers, scale the data observability category to new verticals, and grow its U.S. and EMEA go-to-market and engineering teams.
In M&A activity we heard … Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company that crushes business complexity, announced the acquisition of Everflow, an innovative process mining software company based in Brazil. Everflow’s highly intuitive software will enable Pega clients to uncover and fix hidden process inefficiencies that often bog down organizational operations. Combined with Pega’s market-leading AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation capabilities, this acquisition will help Pega deliver the most complete hyperautomation solution available for enterprises … NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, announced it has completed its acquisition of Instaclustr, a leading platform provider of fully managed open-source database, pipeline and workflow applications delivered as a service.
We also learned of a number of new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … Rescale, a leader in high performance computing (HPC) built for the cloud to accelerate engineering innovation, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, announced a strategic partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Rescale’s Public Sector Distributor making its computational engineering solutions available to the public sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V and Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2) contracts … MariaDB Corporation and MindsDB, a leader in in-database machine learning, together announced a technology collaboration that makes machine learning predictions easy and accessible to cloud database users. By using MindsDB in SkySQL, MariaDB’s fully managed cloud database service, data science and data engineering teams can increase their organization’s predictive capabilities to plan for and address real-world business issues … Responsible AI Institute (RAII), a leading non-profit dedicated to independent AI assessments and certification, announced its partnership with the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) in a first-of-its-kind pilot to determine requirements for the development of a conformity assessment program for AI management systems … Okera, the Universal Data Authorization company, announced that it has joined forces with Data and Tech Aid (D.A.T.A.), a volunteer community formed by individuals and businesses with roots in data & analytics and technology, to support the organization’s goal of providing medical relief to the people in Ukraine. Together, their goal is to support the Kyiv School of Economics Charitable Foundation (KSE CF) by purchasing 10,000 medical kits, worth $1 million in 6 weeks … QuestDB, the fast open-source time-series database, and MindsDB, a leader in in-database machine learning, announced a technology partnership to advance machine learning predictions. Through the integrated solution, data science and data engineering teams can increase their organization’s predictive capabilities to plan for and address real-world business issues. Users of QuestDB will now be able to add Machine Learning based predictions directly into their datasets. This dramatically simplifies the task of analyzing and predicting future trends, putting ML capabilities into the hands of every developer or data scientist familiar with QuestDB. The use cases for business predictions cut across every business function such as finance, sales, risk analysis, logistics, operations, Human Resources and marketing … SirionLabs, a provider of AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution SirionOne, has entered into an alliance with one of the leading auditing, tax and advisory firms in Germany, KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (KPMG ). The alliance is designed to help KPMG´s clients accelerate the digitalization of their entire contract lifecycle encompassing supplier and client mandates. The solution covers contract authoring, performance management, invoice auditing, relationship management, risk management, and advanced analytics. In addition, SirionLabs’ AI solution is designed to bring all enterprise teams including legal, procurement, finance, and sales together to author stronger agreements, manage risk and strengthen counterparty relationships … Alation Inc., a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced that leading data quality and data observability providers such as Acceldata, Anomalo, Bigeye, Experian, FirstEigen, Lightup, and Soda, and industry partners including Capgemini and Fivetran, have joined Alation in support of its newly launched Alation Open Data Quality Initiative for the Modern Data Stack. The program provides customers with the freedom of choice and flexibility when selecting the best data quality and data observability vendors to fit the needs of their modern, data- driven organizations.
In the people movement category we have … Ventiv Technology, a leading provider of advanced analytics for risk, claims and underwriting solutions, announced the appointment of Mark Tainton to lead its Advanced Analytics product division … Matillion, a leading enterprise cloud data integration platform, announced the appointment of its General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer. Markus Bauman joins the company as it moves into a new phase of growth, having reached unicorn status late last year following its most recent Series E funding … LogicMonitor, a leading SaaS-based unified observability platform for enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs), announced the appointment of Nitin Navare as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).Pulling from a strong bench of company leaders, CEO Christina Kosmowski elevated Navare to her executive leadership team, where, as CTO, Navare will be responsible for leading LogicMonitor’s technology strategy and overseeing engineering and cloud operations. With more than 20 years of experience in building enterprise software in the monitoring domain, he has led several globally distributed engineering, operations, UX and data science teams … Alluxio, the developer of the open source data orchestration platform for data driven workloads such as large-scale analytics and AI/ML, announced the appointment of Sridhar Venkatesh to the new position of SVP of product reporting to Alluxio Founder and CEO, Haoyuan (HY) Li. He will lead product management and product marketing efforts as demand for scaling distributed AI and machine learning workloads in the cloud accelerates … Kyndi, a leading natural language processing (NLP) company, announced that John Reuter has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) effective immediately. With a unique talent for understanding and quickly conveying the values of AI-enabled solutions, John brings his three decades of proven success in selling cutting-edge technology solutions to innovative companies around the world. John joined Kyndi at a critical time as the company is headed towards a 400% increase in revenue and a 300% expansion in customer acquisition. To continue to meet this exceptional growth and scale rapidly across the various target markets, Kyndi is investing heavily in sales and marketing functions. In his role as CRO, John will be responsible for all revenue-generation strategy and execution worldwide and will report directly to Kyndi’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Welsh … CloudFabrix, the inventor of Robotic Data Automation Fabric, unifying Observability, AIOps and Automation on cfxCloud SaaS platform, today announced the appointment of Shailesh Manjrekar, as Vice President of AI and Marketing to the leadership team … Bright Data, a leading public web data collection platform, has announced the appointment of Erez Naveh as its VP of Product. In his new role, Naveh will lead the company’s extensive product innovation team as it continues to serve the company’s customers and partners with best-in-class products for enriched, reliable and quality-focused web data solutions … Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse paradigm, announced the appointment of Trâm Phi as Senior Vice President and General Counsel. In this role, Phi will pull from her decades of experience scaling high-growth companies, both public and private, to lead and grow the legal function at Databricks. She will join the company’s executive leadership team … PingCAP, a leading distributed SQL provider and cloud database vendor, announced the appointment of industry veteran, Takuya Hirano, as a new Executive Advisor. Hirano brings over 25 years of experience in overseeing enterprise digital transformation, optimizing business operations, and leading innovative and diverse teams globally that will strengthen PingCAP’s leadership in the industry.
For new customer wins we have … Kyligence, announced that Strikingly, a leading online web platform enabling individuals to build mobile-optimized websites, is using the Kyligence Cloud Platform and Managed Services to provide data services that enable website builders to perform faster web traffic analytics. Serving more than 5,000,000 global website builders, Strikingly chose Kyligence for its ability to support high concurrency and query response times within seconds … Percona, a leader in open source database software and services, announced that Man Group, a global, technology-empowered active investment management firm with $151.4 billion in assets under management[1], has selected Percona for 24/7/365 support for its critical applications that depend on MongoDB. Percona will provide Premium Support to Man Group’s Alpha Technology division, guaranteeing uptime for its core research and trading data applications … Kao Data, the specialist developer and operator of high-performance data centers for enterprise, cloud, HPC and AI, has announced it has secured a new customer contract with Speechmatics, the leading speech recognition technology scaleup, providing highly accurate speech-to-text to global enterprise businesses. Speechmatics’ new high-performance computing (HPC) deployment includes NVIDIA A100 GPUs, housed within an advanced Supermicro computing infrastructure, which will be hosted at Kao Data’s Harlow campus. The supercomputer will allow Speechmatics to expand its GPU-accelerated neural network research and development, supporting increasing customer demand for its leading speech recognition technology.
Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC. As of May 31, 2022, the total number for the first five months of the year comes to 528 new “deep learning” patents. The projection for 2022 is now 1,267, which will substantially exceed the 2021 total of 1,104.
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