“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 10/21/2022

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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 funding news … Stability AI, the community-driven, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) company announced USD $101 million in funding. The oversubscribed round was led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. Stability AI will use the funding to accelerate the development of open AI models for image, language, audio, video, 3D, and more, for consumer and enterprise use cases globally … Tellius, a leading AI-driven decision intelligence platform, announced a $16 million Series B funding round led by Baird Capital. All of Tellius’ existing investors—Sands Capital Ventures, Grotech Ventures, and Veraz Investments—participated in the round, bringing the company’s total fundraising to $33 million to date. The funding will be used to enhance Tellius’ decision intelligence platform, expand the company’s go-to-market capabilities, and support talent acquisition across sales, marketing, and product engineering functions … TuMeke Ergonomics, a computer vision platform that automatically assesses injury risk in manufacturing facilities, has secured $2.5M in seed funding. The round was led by the health-tech-focused GSR Ventures, with participation from OVO Fund, Tuesday Capital, OneValley Ventures, Reach Ventures, Pirque Ventures, and Metagrove Ventures, among others … Jasper, an AI Content Platform, announced it has raised a $125 million Series A funding round at $1.5 billion valuation. The round is led by global software investor Insight Partners and joined by other leading firms including Coatue, Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital, HubSpot Ventures and more. The funding will be used to further invest in the product, improve the customer experience, and bring Jasper to all the platforms creators use. The funding follows on the heels of the addition of Jasper Art, text-to-image generation functionality. The company’s newest innovation is a browser extension that allows Jasper to power every textbox on virtually any site … Kubiya, a leading Conversational AI solution for DevOps teams, announced that it has raised a $6M Seed round led by Hyperwise Ventures alongside investors Pierre Lamond, Giora Yaron, and others. The round enables Kubiya to expand its go-to-market strategy, further extend its offering and ultimately redefine DevOps processes in businesses of all sizes. Facilitating self-service capabilities across businesses’ functions relieves the immense burden DevOps teams face when dealing with day-to-day demands, powering the wider workforce to solve issues independent of technical expertise … Redbird, an analytics operating system for the enterprise, announced it has raised $7.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by multi-stage investment firm B Capital. The funding also included participation from Y Combinator, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Soma Capital, along with several other funds and angel investors … Alkymi, the leader in data workflow automation, has raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors Canaan, Work-Bench and SimCorp. Intel Capital’s Investment Director Dave Mueller will join Alkymi’s Board of Directors, applying his expertise in enterprise technology and go-to-market to scale the company’s growth … Clearspeed, a leading provider of voice analytics technology to assess security and fraud risk, announced a $27 million Series C financing, bringing the company’s total funds raised to $50 million. The funding round was led by investors Ian McKinnon, founder of Sandia Holdings, LLC, and Thomas O’Malley Jr., founder of PilotRock Investments, LLC, and supported by King Philanthropies, the philanthropic endeavor of Robert and Dorothy King. The Series C funding will support rapid commercial expansion and delivery of a world-class customer experience and continue to drive an innovative technology roadmap to serve the security and financial services markets …  Automation Anywhere, Inc. , a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), announced that it is has secured $200 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital, and Hercules Capital, Inc. (NYSE: HTGC). The financing is intended to provide operational and strategic capital for the next several years … SingleStore, the cloud-native database built for speed and scale to power data-intensive applications, announced it has closed its F-2 round of financing at $146 million, led by Goldman Sachs … Immerok, developers of a serverless Apache Flink cloud platform for real-time stream processing, announced it has closed on a $17 million seed funding round led by CUSP Capital, 468 Capital, Cortical VC, and  Essence VC along with participation from several angel investors, including Apache Flink co-creator, Stephan Ewen … SandboxAQ, an enterprise SaaS company delivering the combined impact of AI and Quantum technology (AQ), and Qunnect, a quantum networking company building hardware to transform telecommunications infrastructure into scalable quantum networks, announced SandboxAQ’s investment in Qunnect’s $8M Series A, led by Airbus Ventures. These new funds will be used to further develop their product suite, scale manufacturing, and launch a multi-node R&D quantum network testbed to demonstrate entanglement distribution protocols. This network, connected to existing fiber optic cable in New York City, will be the first of its kind in the US … RisingWave Labs, the streaming database company, announced a $36 million round of funding to meet surging demand for streaming databases that enable users to make real-time decisions based on the most recent data.  The Series A round, led by multiple partners, including the investment arm of a leading global gaming firm, Yunqi Partners, and several individual investors, brings the total funding to over $40 million.

We also heard of some new M&A news … Deloitte announced that it has acquired the business of SFL Scientific, a leading, award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and data science consulting firm. This acquisition underscores Deloitte’s commitment to investing in the capabilities that public and private sector clients need to transform their businesses for future success. Combining SFL Scientific’s deep science and analytics knowledge with Deloitte’s breadth of AI capabilities and industry depth and experience further positions Deloitte as an AI leader, advances its ability to deliver AI-fueled transformations for clients, and accelerates the growth of its AI market share … Gradient AI, a leading enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the insurance industry, announced that it has acquired Prognos Health’s analytics business underwriting unit to leverage data from the company’s large collection of integrated medical records and lab data via its real-world data marketplace. 

In the new partnerships, alignments and collaborations category we learned … Dataiku, the platform for Everyday AI, announced a partnership with global consulting firm Slalom. Through the agreement, enterprise organizations will receive a cutting-edge platform from Dataiku to manage and govern projects, and a business partner in Slalom to guide AI and MLOps adoption and strategy … Alation Inc., a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced a new partnership with dbt Labs, a pioneer in analytics engineering, to bring information about dbt models, tests, and metrics into Alation Data Catalog. Breaking down silos and providing greater visibility into data transformation increases data trust and data accuracy and improves the speed of data-driven decision-making … MANTA, the data lineage platform, announced it has partnered with global SaaS software company MEGA International to deliver comprehensive data lineage and governance solutions to its customers and partner organizations … Dstillery, the custom audience solutions company, partnered with PurpleLab, Inc., a healthcare data and analytics platform provider, to power its Custom Patient Targeting solution with real-world data, including ICD-10 codes from claims data, making the solution even more custom and precise … Classiq, a leader in quantum software, announced that it is working with Rolls-Royce to implement novel computational fluid dynamics algorithms. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) deals with heavy, and complex numerical simulations of fluid and gas phenomena. Used in many industrial applications, CFD is key to improving advanced equipment design by, for example, optimizing aerodynamics and thermodynamics. The collaboration will combine quantum and classical computing techniques, leveraging the strengths of each technology … Botify, a leading enterprise software company for organic search, announced a partnership with Semrush, a leading online visibility management SaaS platform, to provide customers with streamlined access to competitive insights. The new integration, which brings complementary search data into Botify, allows customers to better understand the value of ranking on a given keyword, and provides increased visibility to competitors’ organic performance. Now, customers can analyze first- and third-party data from a central platform, creating efficiencies and more comprehensive insights … Reltio and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to unleash the impact of analytics and data science teams to deliver on business outcomes. This collaboration improves the customer experience by making it easier for them to consolidate, cleanse and enrich data in real-time with master data management capabilities in Google BigQuery … Fivetran, a leader in modern data integration, announced an extended partnership and new product capabilities with Microsoft Azure to help joint customers accelerate their data-driven digital transformations. The deepening partnership between Fivetran and Microsoft Azure includes support for the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, in addition to integrations with Azure Synapse and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) products, ultimately helping to deliver a more seamless solution for automated data movement in the enterprise … Anomalo, the complete data quality platform company, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to help organizations trust the data they use to make decisions and build products. The combination provides customers with a way to monitor the quality of the data in any table in BigQuery’s platform without writing code, configuring rules or setting thresholds … DataStax, the real-time data company, announced a strategic collaboration with Intel to enhance the performance of technologies built on the open source Apache Cassandra® database and the Apache Pulsar™messaging and streaming technology on latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The companies plan to deliver enterprise and cloud solutions built on these powerful open source projects as well as contributing advancements to the respective open source projects. DataStax has been selected for the Intel Disruptor Initiative, where Intel collaborates with select cutting-edge companies that are pushing the limits of innovation … Cribl and Cloudian® announced a modern data analytics solution that integrates Cribl Stream and Cloudian HyperStore® object storage to provide an observability platform on an on-premises, S3-compatible data lake. The joint solution enables organizations to ingest, parse, restructure and enrich large data volumes in flight, ensuring they get the right data in the formats they need — all securely behind their firewall. Users can convert logs into metrics, reduce cost, and increase search speed … Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, announced it has partnered with MongoDB. The partnership means that enterprises using Platform.sh now have access to the latest version of MongoDB. This will help them improve visibility via one source of control, giving users the ability to track multiple applications and include native, at-rest encryption that meets the latest security compliance standards … Striveworks and Protopia AI are excited to announce their partnership to jointly support the need for timely, relevant and trusted AI/ML models in highly regulated industries … ADSS, the Abu Dhabi and London-based financial services firm, has partnered with leading real-time analytics company KX to increase operational efficiency as it rolls out its transformational growth strategy and offers clients greater access to liquidity and a broader range of financial instruments. 

In the new customer wins department we heard … RealPage, an industry leader in SaaS-based Property Management Solutions, announced that they have selected Wallaroo Labs as their applied AI platform. Using Wallaroo, RealPage will scale their AI and machine learning initiatives to over 1,000 regions for use cases such as marketing attribution, digital behavior insights for prospects and renters, and call lead scoring … TigerGraph, provider of a leading advanced analytics and ML platform for connected data, has announced that Plexigrid, an innovative developer of software solutions for the management of electrical distribution grids, is using TigerGraph’s graph platform and analytics solution to help solve the challenge of managing power grids in an age of intermittent renewables and an increasingly electrified urban infrastructure … Netradyne, a SaaS leader in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and edge computing focusing on driver and fleet safety, today announces that customer Best Logistics Group has significantly decreased its claims and improved its driver safety program over the past year is reporting tremendous results since rolling out Netradyne’s A.I. vision-based Driver•i safety camera platform … Yellowbrick Data, a leading multi-cloud data warehouse vendor, announced that Custom Data Processing Inc. (CDP), a national provider of software solutions to federal, state, and local public health organizations, has selected Yellowbrick to manage its growing data volumes. With Yellowbrick, CDP customers and public-sector agencies make better decisions by analyzing vast amounts of data faster, in the cloud or on-premises, as government policies require, leveraging Yellowbrick’s unique ability to deploy anywhere.

People movement news includes … Orgaimi, the AI-powered client intelligence platform that accelerates growth for law and accounting firms, announced the strategic hire of acclaimed legal innovation expert, influencer, and thought leader Stephen Allen to join its go-to-market team as Market Evangelist. The transformational leader will support Orgaimi’s market expansion efforts in the LegalTech space through business development activities, strategic partnership building, co-marketing initiatives, and industry community engagement … Cognigy, a market leader in Conversational AI, announced that Hardy Myers has been appointed senior vice president, business development and strategy for the company. In this role, Myers will work closely with Cognigy’s co-founders and senior management team to develop the company’s strategic priorities, secure and activate partnerships, and implement the optimal business processes to achieve Cognigy’s strategic and financial objectives … Percona, a leader in open source database software, support, and services, announced that Ann Schlemmer, former President, is officially stepping into the role of CEO, while Peter Zaitsev is transitioning from CEO to the role of Founder, where he will remain strategically engaged with the company … Domo (Nasdaq: DOMO) announced that Monica Pool Knox will join the company as Chief People Officer (CPO), reporting to Chief Executive Officer John Mellor. In this role, Pool Knox will lead the global Human Resources organization with a focus on optimizing the capability of Domo’s talent and inspiring a culture where employees can do their best work. Known for building high-performing organizations, Pool Knox has provided strategic HR leadership for companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, Sony, PepsiCo, The Walt Disney Company and Verizon Wireless, Puerto Rico … SingleStore, the cloud-native database built for speed and scale to power data-intensive applications, announced it has appointed Sue Bostrom to its board of directors. Bostrom has served on the boards of more than a dozen technology companies over the last two decades and is the former executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Cisco Systems … ALTR, innovator of automated cloud data control and security solutions, announced that company Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer James Beecham has been promoted to Chief Executive Officer. In this role, Beecham will leverage his technical acumen and passion for the industry and the business to lead the company’s next phase of accelerated expansion. Additionally, the company appointed Co-founder and Vice President Engineering, Chris Struttmann, to the Chief Technology Officer position. Previous CEO David Sikora will remain actively involved with ALTR as a Board Director, CEO Advisor and continued financial investor … Striim, Inc., a global leader in unified real-time data integration and streaming, announced it has added two cloud industry veterans to its world-class product team. Varun Verma has been added as vice president, Software Development, Cloud. In this role, Varun will lead the development of all global cloud services. In addition, Jason Selvidge has joined Striim as vice president, Software Development. Both new development heads will report to Alok Pareek, Striim’s co-founder and EVP, Product. 

In new patent news we have … Lightbits®, the software-defined and architected for NVMe/TCP data platform for any cloud, announced it has been assigned a patent (11,467,730) for “system and method for managing data storage on non-volatile memory media.” The innovation described in this patent strengthens Lightbits’ position as a leader in offering high-performance block storage. The Lightbits software, which is architected for NAND flash, is optimized to leverage the full benefits of quad-level cell (QLC) NAND SSDs, providing performance and density at a cost-optimized form factor. The innovation described in this patent takes Lightbits’ Intelligent Flash Management technology a step further through a QLC-optimized caching policy that only writes to the flash media when it is the right time to do so. By improving flash endurance the Lightbits Data Platform offers customers a highly optimized price/performance solution for I/O-intensive workloads in any orchestration environment OpenStack, VMware, and Kubernetes,  and on any cloud.

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