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.
As we approach the end of 2023, all I have to say is WOW! What a year for tech. But 2024 should be even more spicy! Let’s start our round-up with some new funding news …
– Lightmatter, a leader in photonics, announced it has raised a $155M Series C-2 led by GV (Google Ventures) and Viking Global Investors, with participation from others. With this round, Lightmatter has raised over $420 million to date and is now valued at over $1.2B. This new financing allows the company to expedite growth to meet the increasing demand for high-performance computing (HPC) from AI innovators. Lightmatter plans to expand its world-class team and office footprint, while accelerating its ability to provide customers increased performance on the most advanced AI workloads.
– O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC (“OSV”), a family office that invests in ambitious seed and pre-seed startups, announced that it has invested in Obviously AI, Inc.. Founded in 2020 by Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath, Obviously AI enables companies to use their raw data to generate actionable insights using AI models. Whereas previously using AI to gather conclusions from data would be a costly and time-consuming process, Obviously AI makes the process possible with just a few clicks.
– Featureform, the MLOps feature store for building AI and ML systems, announced $5.5MM in Seed funding led by GreatPoint Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners with participation from Tuesday Capital and Alumni Ventures. This round of capital allows Featureform to expand its product growth and increase support for existing and new enterprise customers, in addition to its open-source community. The completion of the Seed round brings Featureform’s total funding to date to $8.1MM. At enterprise companies, LLM usage has surged alongside traditional ML use cases. At the heart of both these systems is private data. The most critical thing that ML teams do is take their raw data and transform it into valuable signals to feed into LLMs via prompts or ML models as inputs. Featureform believes there needs to be a unified framework to define, manage, and deploy these signals (or features). This creates a unified resource library that can be used by all ML/AI teams across an organization with built-in search&discovery, monitoring, orchestration, and governance. Featureform has seen to this be true with their existing customers in the ML space and has begun spearheading this approach in the LLM space.
– Armada, an edge computing pioneer redefining the future of connectivity, compute and AI, exited stealth. The company marks this milestone with a significant capital raise exceeding $55M, led by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital and 8090 Industries, with participation from Felicis, Contrary, Valor Equity Partners, Marlinspike, 137 Ventures, Koch Real Estate Investments, 8VC and a cohort of other strategic investors. This funding will propel Armada forward in its mission to bridge the global digital divide, empowering businesses and communities to leverage all of their data, regardless of where it’s generated. Armada is dedicated to unlocking the potential of generative AI, edge computing and predictive models on a global scale.
– Tembo, a managed Postgres service that dramatically simplifies the deployment and management of high-performance application-optimized databases, announced it raised a $7M seed led by Venrock with participation from Fireroad, CincyTech, and Wireframe Ventures.
– Datalogz, a pioneer in ending BI sprawl for data-mature organizations globally, announced that it has secured $5 million in funding, led by GreatPoint Ventures, with participation from Graphene Ventures, Squadra Ventures, Berkeley Skydeck, Defined, Mana Ventures, and Trajectory Ventures. This significant milestone brings the startup’s total fundraising for 2023 to just under $8 million.
– VAST Data, the AI data platform company, announced that it has secured $118 million in Series E funding, led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and accompanied by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), BOND Capital and Drive Capital.
– ON — formerly GameOn Technology — announced a fresh funding round and an updated mission to help enterprises and leading brands productize generative AI chat. The company’s established leadership position in the AI chat ecosystem, coupled with the growing marketplace excitement for generative AI, prompted a strategic $25 million funding round, bringing the total funding raised to $80 million. Notable participants in the round include Equiam; B3 Capital; Commonwealth Financial Network; and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, which previously co-led the company’s Series B.
– EnCharge AI, the company developing advanced AI chips and full stack solutions, announced it has closed a second institutional round of funding from strategic partners including VentureTech Alliance, RTX Ventures, and ACVC Partners with participation from existing investors such as Anzu Partners, AlleyCorp, Scout VC, Silicon Catalyst Angels and S5V. The funding round underscores the demand for new AI chips capable of running AI system workloads at a far lower cost and with greater efficiency than previously thought possible.
– Asato.ai, the AI-powered enterprise Copilot platform, announced the closing of its oversubscribed $7.5 million seed financing round, co-led by Intel Capital and Lip-Bu Tan, with participation from Shah Capital Partners, and several prominent angel investors including Amarjit Gill, serial entrepreneur and investor at Nepenthe Capital, Ash Bhardwaj, entrepreneur and investor, Charlie Giancarlo, CEO and Chairman of Pure Storage, and Sanjay Mehrotra, President and CEO of Micron Technologies, Inc. Backed by this investment, Asato is poised to bring to market the industry’s first AI-powered enterprise CIO Copilot.
– Kognitos, a trailblazer in generative AI for business automation, announced the close of a $20M Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Clear Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Wipro Ventures. The fresh funding brings the company’s venture capital raised to date to $30M adding to the seed round closed earlier this year. Founded in 2020, the company aims to build a future where all business applications will be written in English, where machines understand human language natively and where interacting with a computer is as easy as communicating with a human.
– Expanso, a startup built to help enterprises manage their ever growing data needs with a distributed approach to big data processing powered by its open-source software Bacalhau, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst and Hetz Ventures, along with Array Ventures.
– Lynx, a leading provider of AI software that detects and prevents fraud and financial crimes, announced an $18 million (€17 million) Series A financing round led by Forgepoint Capital, with the participation of Banco Santander, a Lynx shareholder. Forgepoint Capital Managing Director Leo Casusol will join Lynx’s Board of Directors.
– Canopy, the composability platform, launched with $4 million in seed funding from leading venture capital firms, Kindred Ventures and Village Global. Canopy removes the complexity, custom code and time it takes to integrate, serve, and observe all the critical data companies need to grow their business. Enterprise organizations rely on Canopy for a distributed backend architecture that was previously only available to technology’s biggest companies, while Software as a Service (SaaS) companies use Canopy to reduce costly integration cycles, increase sales and unlock more revenue.
– ALTR Solutions, Inc., a leading innovator of automated data governance and data security solutions, announced that it has closed on its $25 Million Series C Preferred financing to meet the overwhelming demand for its SaaS-based data access governance and security solutions. Led by John Stafford III, and including new investors from the financial, medical, and data space, the Series C will be used to bolster ALTR’s market position in the cloud data access governance and security space, fast-track its go-to-market strategy by expanding its footprint across various data sources, grow partner integrations, and develop channel relations.
In news M&A activity we heard … IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Software AG (FRA: SOW), a company majority owned by Silver Lake, to purchase StreamSets and webMethods, Software AG’s Super…
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