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.
These are very exciting times in our industry so let’s get started with some new funding news … CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, announced it has secured $221 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Magnetar Capital, a leading alternative asset manager, with contributions from NVIDIA, and rounded out by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross … Fluree, which has developed a graph ledger database and data pipeline toolset for trusted-, interoperable-, secure-data management and sharing, announced it has closed a $10 million Series A funding round led by SineWave Ventures. Eve Atlas, Augment Ventures, Nanban Ventures, Wave Financial, and existing investors Good Growth Capital and Rise of the Rest also participated … SoundHound AI, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOUN), a global leader in voice artificial intelligence, announced that it closed a new $125 million loan facility, with $100 million fully-funded at closing, from Atlas Credit Partners. This strategic transaction completes the Company’s plans announced at the beginning of this year to refinance its current debt and further solidify its balance sheet. This new facility will enable SoundHound AI to replace its existing $30 million debt with a more favorable structure that reduces the company’s cash outflows and extends the maturity date to 2027. Additionally, the funds provide substantial incremental capital to drive further innovation and support the Company’s growth plans … Cybersyn, the data-as-a-service company, announced it has raised $62.9 million in Series A funding and emerged from stealth to launch its data-as-a-service (DaaS) offering. The company was founded in 2022 and is led by Alex Izydorczyk, who brings deep knowledge of data systems from his previous role as head of data science at investment firm Coatue … CerebrumX Lab Inc. (CerebrumX), a leading AI-driven automotive data services & product provider, announced a strategic investment from BlackBerry that will help it ramp up the delivery of new data-driven, in-vehicle products and services that make it easier for automakers to create turnkey user-centric applications and enterprise solutions. CerebrumX has a highly secure, AI-based Augmented Deep Learning Platform (ADLP) that’s been deployed on more than 45 million trips and captured more than 100 million miles of data. CerebrumX works with automakers enabling them to generate innovative use-cases across every aspect of their business by tapping into key data-driven insights on vehicle and driver performance … Agnostiq, Inc., announced it has secured $6.1 million in seed extension funding to accelerate further development and commercialization of its enterprise-grade quantum and high-performance computing (HPC) platform. The additional growth financing is led by Differential Ventures, with follow-on participation from Scout Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, Green Egg Ventures and Rob Granieri, Principal at Jane Street Capital. The company previously raised $2 million in seed funding … Quantexa, a global leader in Decision Intelligence (DI) solutions for the public and private sectors, announced that it has completed a $129 million Series E funding round. The latest investment round secures the British tech company’s unicorn status with a valuation of $1.8 billion and will accelerate the execution of its growth strategy within the *$230bn Decision Intelligence category. The round was led by GIC, a global institutional investor, and existing investors also participated, including Warburg Pincus, Dawn Capital, British Patient Capital, Evolution Equity Partners, HSBC, BNY Mellon, ABN AMRO Ventures, and AlbionVC. This investment comes less than 18 months after Quantexa closed its $157 million Series D funding round in July 2021 and just weeks after its acquisition of Aylien, a Dublin-based leader in natural language processing (NLP) and advanced AI … Honeycomb, a leading observability platform used by high-performing engineering teams to investigate the behavior of cloud applications, announced it has raised $50 million in Series D funding. Headline leads the round with participation from other existing investors, Insight Partners and Scale Venture Partners. This round brings the total capital raised to nearly $150 million, including customer angel investments from HelloFresh CEO Dominik Richter and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch … Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), the Analytics Cloud Platform company, has announced a strategic investment in Fiddler, a pioneer in Model Performance Management (MPM), to augment Alteryx Machine Learning within the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform. With this investment from Alteryx Ventures, joint customers will be able to better operationalize how they build enterprise-level machine learning pipelines with increased governance.
In M&A activity we heard … BMC, a global leader in software solutions for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, announced the acquisition of Model9 Software, a mainframe cloud data management software company that delivers innovation to companies looking for a fast, smooth, and low-risk path to the cloud for data management, data protection, and data analytics. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2023, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed.
We also learned of some new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … Wallaroo.AI, a leader in operationalizing machine learning to ROI in the cloud, in decentralized networks, and at the edge, and VMware, which enables organizations to build, run, manage, connect, and protect edge-native applications with VMware Edge Compute Stack, announced a strategic agreement to provide the first unified edge ML/artificial intelligence (AI) deployment and operations platform specifically tailored for the unique needs of global communications service providers (CSPs) … Rainbird Technologies has formed a strategic partnership with Relanto, a global consulting and professional services firm specializing in AI-driven enterprise planning and decision-making solutions. The partnership will bring together Rainbird’s human-centred symbolic AI platform with Relanto’s Mindful AI, which takes an empathic approach to business transformation. This partnership will offer clients an exceptional advantage in accomplishing their strategic goals … Zendesk announced its collaboration with OpenAl, an Al research and deployment company, to launch new capabilities that add to the power of Zendesk’s proprietary foundational models with OpenAl’s capabilities … Dataiku, the platform for Everyday AI, and Genpact (NYSE: G), a global professional services firm focused on delivering outcomes that transform businesses, have announced a strategic alliance to help organizations accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives to transform their businesses at scale. Dataiku’s Everyday AI platform, combined with Genpact’s technology-agnostic MLOps and Responsible AI framework, will provide a differentiated solution that addresses major challenges faced by organizations in the implementation of AI, such as data governance, model management, and compliance requirements … data.world, the enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack, announced a partnership with ThoughtSpot, the AI-Powered Analytics company, to help customers make faster, better, and more trusted data-informed decisions. The technical integration between data.world’s data catalog and ThoughtSpot’s Liveboards, Answers, and Worksheets provides rich visibility into both the lineage and governance of the data needed to make decisions. With this integration, business users can more readily discover data, definitions, and metrics in ThoughtSpot, use them to inform decision making, and have greater visibility into the origins and governance of the underlying data … TDengine™, the popular open-source time-series data platform, and Casne Engineering, industrial engineering and technology services provider, announced a strategic partnership aimed at advancing innovation in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Through this partnership, Casne Engineering will integrate TDengine’s time-series database technology into its existing IIoT solutions, creating a comprehensive IIoT platform for industrial customers. The collaboration seeks to help customers improve operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) … VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI era, announced that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has incorporated VAST Data’s leading file software platform into the new HPE GreenLake for File Storage service. By leveraging VAST’s unique and innovative scale-out software architecture for the new HPE GreenLake for File Storage, enterprise customers can manage unstructured data with high performance at scale to deliver superior time to data insight … Alation Inc., a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced expanded partnerships with Databricks, the lakehouse company, and dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, to extend knowledge, collaboration, and trust across the modern data stack. Joint customers can now easily integrate rich metadata from Databricks Unity Catalog and leverage a new connector that provides support for dbt Core and dbt Cloud in Alation. As a result, users have a better understanding of their data landscape and can view underlying data changes and transformations to power data intelligence … As a leader in AI technology for music learning and production, Moises.ai is expanding opportunities for student growth and innovation through their latest partnership with Berklee Online, the online extension of Berklee College of Music, one of the most prestigious music institutions in the world.
In people movement news we have … Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), the cybersecurity and observability leader, announced Min Wang as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), effective immediately. Reporting to Tom Casey, SVP, Products & Technology, Wang will partner with leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Design and Go-to-Market teams to advance the vision and technical direction of Splunk’s product portfolio innovation so customers can develop greater digital resilience … Amplitude, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMPL), a leading digital analytics platform, announced the appointment of Nathaniel Crook as the company’s next chief revenue officer (CRO). With over 20 years of enterprise software sales and engineering experience, Crook will lead Amplitude’s sales and partner organizations globally … Standigm, a company using artificial intelligence (AI) technology for drug discovery and development, announced that Younsung Choo has been appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO). As the new CEO of Standigm, Choo will focus primarily on company strategy, planning, R&D and business development … MariaDB plc (NYSE: MRDB) announced the appointment of Conor McCarthy as chief financial officer (CFO), effective April 10, 2023. McCarthy, who has over 30 years leading finance organizations at high-growth companies, brings significant experience scaling software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses … Domino Data Lab, provider of a leading Enterprise MLOps platform trusted by over 20% of the Fortune 100, announced that former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt has joined the company as a strategic advisor to Domino’s senior leadership team. In his new role, Hunt will advise on Domino’s hybrid cloud data science strategy for federal agencies … Crux, an end-to-end data integration, transformation, and observability solution, announced that Jonathan W. Buckley and Karen Moran have joined the leadership team as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer, respectively. As CMO, Buckley manages the Crux brand and leverages his high growth-company experience to develop and deploy the company’s go-to-market strategy. In the CFO role, Moran oversees all aspects of the company’s financial functions, applying her deep technology sector expertise to drive financial strategy … ALTR, innovator of automated data governance policy enforcement and data security solutions, announced the expansion of its board of directors with the appointment of data industry thought leader Jonathan Sander. Snowflake’s first Security Field Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Sander brings his deep background and industry insight to the Snowflake Premier Technology partner’s board … SnapLogic, a leader in intelligent integration and enterprise automation, announced the company added seasoned industry veteran, Tony Owens, to its board of directors to guide teams on go-to-market strategy and global expansion … Hyperscience, a provider of enterprise artificial intelligence solutions, announced the appointment of Andrew Joiner as its new Chief Executive Officer. Joiner’s wealth of experience and proven track record in the software industry will contribute greatly to the company’s overall strategy and growth initiatives—at a time in which Hyperscience is experiencing rapidly expanding demand.
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