“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 11/16/2022

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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.

Lot’s of BUZZ happening in the big data ecosystem right now! Let’s start with some new funding news … WekaIO (WEKA), the global data platform provider for next generation workloads, announced that it raised $135 million in an oversubscribed Series D funding  round led by Generation Investment Management. Several notable new and existing investors also  contributed, including 10D, Atreides Management, Celesta Capital, Gemini Ventures, Hewlett Packard  Enterprise, Hitachi Ventures, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, Micron Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, MoreTech Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Ventures, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. Despite  recent volatility and uncertainty in the global financial markets that have widely impacted startup valuations  and investments, the company also doubled its previous valuation in the round … Coefficient, the company that turns business users into builders with real-time data connectivity and automation in spreadsheets, announced an $18M Series A investment led by Battery Ventures, the global technology investment firm, along with existing investors Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. The new funding will enable Coefficient—whose product is currently used by customers including Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro—to expand its product offerings and scale its global operations … Dataloop, a leading platform for AI data management and annotation, announced a fresh $33M in Series B funding, which brings the company to a total of $50M in venture capital funding. The round was led by NGP Capital and Alpha Wave Ventures, with participation from existing investors from Dataloop’s Series A, including Amiti Ventures, F2 Venture Capital, Eyal Gura, and global crowdfunding venture firm, OurCrowd. This financial support will be used to expand Dataloop globally, specifically by building teams in the US, Europe, and India … Travtus, a leading AI technology company focused on multifamily operations, announced the completion of its seed financing round. The $4-million round was led by RET Ventures, an industry-backed venture fund focused on single and multi-family real estate technology … Wispr, the neurotechnology company building a more natural way to interact with technology, announced that it raised $10M in equity and debt as part of its Seed II. This brings the total capital raised by Wispr to $14.6M. Major investors in this round include Neo, Triple Point Capital, MVP Ventures, and Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Coinbase and Paradigm Ventures. Their previous investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and 8VC, also increased their ownership in the company. Wispr also brought on some new angel investors like Tom Oxley (CEO of the neurotech startup, Synchron), and Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder and CTO of Dropbox) … LatticeFlow, the AI platform that can automatically find and fix AI data and model errors, announced a $12 million Series A funding round. The investment will enable LatticeFlow to expand the capabilities of its platform and respond to growing customer demand as more companies – including a number of Fortune 500 customers including Siemens Mobility, and AI scaleups such as Intenseye, Voxel AI, and Carscan – deploy computer vision models at scale … Alation Inc., a leader in enterprise data intelligence, announced it has raised $123 million in a Series E financing led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from new investor, Databricks Ventures. Existing and other investors that also participated include Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corporation, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Union Grove. Total funding raised stands at $340 million, elevating the company’s current valuation to more than $1.7 billion amid the volatile late-stage software-as-a-service (SaaS) growth equity market … Directus, an open source software company focused on democratizing data across the enterprise, announced that it raised $7 million in Series A financing to build the industry’s first open data platform, which instantly adds an API and beautiful no-code app to any SQL database. True Ventures led the round with participation from seed investor Handshake Ventures … Momento has received $15 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and with participation from The General Partnership and angels Marianna Tessel (CTO at Intuit), Neha Narkhede (co-founder and former CTO at Confluent), Tom Killalea (first CISO at Amazon), Don MacAskill (CEO of Flickr/Smugmug) and John Lilly (former CEO of Mozilla). Momento plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, to build a full cycle GTM team, to expand the Momento platform and to add support for additional clouds … bit.io, the fast way to build and collaborate on Postgres databases, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures, with participation from Neo and Combine. 

In new M&A activity we heard … Anonos, provider of technology that protects data in use with 100% accuracy, announced the acquisition of Berlin-based Statice GmbH, a synthetic data software provider. With the addition of the Statice solution, which generates new privacy-preserving data points that reflect the statistical properties of the original data, Anonos expands its ability to provide a comprehensive platform that powers speed to data insights for use cases while enhancing the protection and utilization of data. The Statice synthetic data technology will be integrated with the Anonos Data Embassy platform and available later this quarter. This acquisition follows Anonos’ recent announcement of $50 million in new growth financing backed by its intellectual property portfolio, facilitated by Aon (NYSE: AON) and led by GT Investment Partners (“Ghost Tree Partners”) … DMI, a global leader in digital transformation services, announced that it has acquired the Ambit Group LLC (“Ambit”), a leading provider of data analytics, cybersecurity, and mission support services to the U.S. Government. The acquisition will further enhance DMI’s comprehensive suite of digital services and expand its portfolio of customers and contract vehicles in high priority federal markets … Maxar Technologies (NYSE:MAXR) (TSX:MAXR), provider of comprehensive space solutions and secure, precise, geospatial intelligence, announced that it has completed the acquisition of AI and software development company Wovenware. This acquisition significantly adds to Maxar’s software engineering and AI capabilities and talent … SirionLabs, the global leader in AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM), announced that contract automation platform Zendoc has joined the Sirion team. This expansion further deepens Sirion’s leadership and commitment to the applications of AI in enhancing CLM as a category. The Zendoc team’s knowledge and experience in creating intuitive AI-powered solutions to manage contracts is a valuable addition to Sirion’s engineering and product talent.       

In the customer wins category we learned … CRU, a global provider of business intelligence and consulting services for the global metals, mining and fertilizer industries, is using prescriptive analytics and Decision Intelligence from Pyramid Analytics to revolutionize how the sector manages its carbon emissions … ZEDEDA, a leader in edge orchestration, announced a key supply agreement with Rockwell Automation to provide the global leader in industrial automation with distributed edge management and orchestration capabilities. Rockwell Automation will incorporate technology from ZEDEDA as part of its upcoming edge management offering, which allows users to manage edge devices, orchestrate applications, and improve access to manufacturing data. ZEDEDA enables Rockwell Automation’s software portfolio at the distributed edge to serve a rapidly growing market segment … Otonomo Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: OTMO), the platform powering the mobility economy, announced that PREDIK Data-Driven, a data science and research firm, has selected Otonomo to power its innovative geolocation and competitive intelligence solutions. Leveraging commercial vehicle data available via the Otonomo Smart Mobility Data Platform, PREDIK Data-Driven is able to improve its Market Mapping Tool & Business Relationship Identifier solution, which enables customers to detect, identify and measure connections and relationships between companies and facilities across the U.S. and Europe. With highly reliable and granular data through Otonomo, PREDIK Data-Driven is able to monitor and analyze distribution routes and strengthen its data science models for customers … MarkLogic Corporation, a leader in complex data and metadata management and portfolio company of Vector Capital, announced that its unified data platform is underpinning the UK Government’s drive to turn court judgements into data for analysis in order to improve transparency in the justice system. The National Archives, the UK Government’s official archive and publisher, launched its new service, Find Case Law based on the MarkLogic data platform, in April 2022. The National Archives seeks to replicate, in court judgements and tribunal decisions, the search ability and data analysis already possible in their other MarkLogic-powered solutions at legislation.gov.uk … MariaDB® Corporation announced that Hit Labs, the creators behind the all-in-one communication platform Pronto, is powering its business with Xpand, MariaDB’s distributed SQL database, deployed on a fully managed cloud database service MariaDB SkySQL running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Facing a fast-growing user base, Pronto turned to Xpand in SkySQL for its elasticity and high availability – making it easy to scale out and onboard millions of users. To give their team the ability to focus fully on delivering the best communications experience to their customers, Pronto also brought in SkyDBAs for proactive and expert care of its cloud databases … Instabase, a leader in unstructured data automation, announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has successfully completed a pilot with Satsyil and Instabase’s automation platform to help automate signature extraction from inventor oaths for use with validation of micro entity certifications.  

In people movement news we have … Denodo, a leader in data management, announced two key additions to its executive team to help to guide Denodo through its next phase of growth: Daniel Lender  as Chief Financial Officer and Stephen Welles as Chief Legal Officer. Mr. Lender and Mr. Welles will lead all of Denodo’s global financial and legal strategy and operations, reporting directly to Denodo’s Chief Executive Officer, Angel Viña … Tricentis, a global leader in enterprise continuous testing, announced the appointment of Suhail Ansari as Chief Technology Officer. Ansari will be responsible for defining global tech strategy and delivering world class products, experiences, and platforms to Tricentis customers and partners … Apollo GraphQL, the supergraph company, announced that it has expanded its leadership team, welcoming Smruti Patel as Vice President of engineering. Patel brings more than 15 years of engineering leadership experience to Apollo, having previously led infrastructure teams at Stripe and VMWare … 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 Craig Nelson as Senior Vice President of Global Sales; along with the company’s first dedicated SVP, Business Development and Marketing role led by John Mracek, who formerly also headed sales. The strengthening of Alluxio’s go-to-market team is the direct result of rapid demand for its Data Orchestration Platform that enables enterprises to scale analytics workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments … Unravel Data, the DataOps observability platform built to meet the needs of modern data teams, announced that Ravi Vedantam has joined the company as its new Vice President, Global Partnerships. This expanded leadership position will support the company’s continued growth and follows Unravel Data’s recent Series D funding announcement … Flashpoint, a trusted leader in actionable risk intelligence, introduced Tom Hofmann as Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO) and Patrick Gardner as Chief Product Officer (CPO). Together, they bring more than 40 years of experience delivering intelligence and security products that help commercial and government organizations successfully identify cyber and physical threats, prevent attacks, and holistically reduce risk … Heap, a leading digital analytics provider, is pleased to announce Micha Hershman as its new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). With over two decades of experience leading marketing at companies like Eventbrite and Envoy, Hershman will be responsible for leveraging brand, product marketing, and demand generation to drive growth. Hershman has extensive experience scaling companies, including developing the global demand engine that fueled Eventbrite’s IPO and the category creation work that propelled Envoy’s recent unicorn valuation … MANTA, the data lineage platform, announced that Nancy Louisnord has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer. Louisnord will be responsible for driving the company’s product marketing strategy and global marketing initiatives as it looks to increase product and brand awareness … Enterprise Search leader Sinequa announced the appointment of Wendy Lurrie as the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer. In this new role, Lurrie will manage Sinequa’s global marketing and brand strategy. 

We also heard of some new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … Aporia, the customizable ML observability platform, and ClearML, the unified end-to-end MLOPs platform to develop, orchestrate, and automate ML workflows at scale, announced an end-to-end solution to help data scientists, ML engineers and DevOps teams perfect their ML pipelines. Through this new partnership, Data scientists and DevOps teams will be able to use the combined power of ClearML and Aporia to significantly shorten their time-to-value and time-to-revenue by ensuring ML projects are executed successfully and make it to commercial production more efficiently – from building to deployment and monitoring … Virtualitics, an AI and Data Exploration company, announced that Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), a major command of the United States  Air Force, has expanded its partnership with Virtualitics to establish a Center of Excellence and deliver  AI-enabled software solutions for the bomber and missile weapon systems to increase aircraft  availability and mission readiness. With Virtualitics, AFGSC will benefit from industry-leading technology  to deliver predictive maintenance, inventory management, supply chain optimization, and manpower  resource allocation. Connecting these enterprise solutions ensures that not only are aircraft  maintenance needs identified, but they are also aligned with the exact resources and parts available … Deci, the deep learning company harnessing AI to build AI, announced a new strategic collaboration with Intel to accelerate the journey towards more scalable AI. By combining Deci’s proprietary Automated Neural Architecture Construction (AutoNAC) technology with Intel chip architectures, the two companies will further optimize deep learning inference, enabling developers everywhere to build, optimize, and deploy more accurate, fast and efficient models for the edge, datacenter, and cloud … Rescale, a leader in high performance computing built for the cloud to accelerate engineering innovation, announced it is teaming with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA AI platform into Rescale’s HPC-as-a-Service offering. The integration is designed to advance computational engineering simulation with AI and machine learning, helping enterprises commercialize new product innovations faster, more efficiently and at less cost …  Kensu, the Data Observability company,  announced its partnership with Collibra, the Data Intelligence company, and the availability of an integration between the two solutions. Kensu’s observability capacities will enrich Collibra’s Catalog with clean, trustworthy, and curated information to enable business users and data scientists to make business decisions based on reliable data … Boost.ai, a leading cloud-based provider of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) at scale, announced a new strategic partnership with CallMiner, a leading provider of conversation intelligence that drives improved customer experiences and business outcomes. CallMiner empowers businesses to capture and analyze text and voice-based interactions, and paired with Boost.ai, organizations can glean valuable insights from every single customer conversation, including those with virtual agents … Pyramid Analytics, a pioneering decision intelligence platform provider, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Pyramid Analytics’ Master Government Aggregator®, making the company’s Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform available to federal, state, and local government agencies through Carahsoft’s reseller partners, NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2), National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA), and OMNIA Partners contracts.

  

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