“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 7/13/2021

Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideAI News. 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@insideAINews.com. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

Let’s get this show started with some new funding news … Quantexa, the data and analytics software company pioneering Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI), today announced it has raised $153m in Series D funding from Warburg Pincus and a growing group of blue-chip investors. Quantexa will use the investment to accelerate its plans for regional market expansion and build out its product portfolio development further in areas like data management and industry verticals such a Banking, Insurance, Public Sector and TMT. Quantexa will additionally look for inorganic growth opportunities as part of its corporate strategy … Shopic, the retail AI solution provider, today announced that it had raised an additional $10 million in equity funding bringing the total amount raised to date to $21 million. The round was led by technology growth investor Claridge Israel, with the participation of the company’s existing investors, Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Tal Capital. Shopic creates frictionless, personalized shopping experiences in brick-and-mortar stores. Already deploying its solutions in stores of major grocery chains worldwide, Shopic will use the new funds to accelerate commercial activities and expand its team … Cloudastructure, which provides cloud-controlled video surveillance systems to enterprises, announced today it has secured more than $29.6 million in crowd-sourced commitments from more than 10,000 investors and over $22 million in exercisable warrants in its first RegA+ offering. The company also filed to increase the offering to $75 million, and it was requalified. Cloudastructure’s cloud-based video and surveillance system offers a powerful and affordable tool for businesses to store, index and access footage in the cloud, while eliminating security breaches in the firewall. Using machine learning computer vision, the system can recognize objects, faces and more. The cloud-based platform also offers an alternative to on-premises solutions, which can be costly to operate and scale and require on-site monitoring … Mapped, an AI-powered data infrastructure platform for commercial and industrial IoT, today announced that it closed its seed II funding round. The company raised $6.5M in seed II funding on top of the $3M raised in February 2020, taking its total raise to $9.5M. Investors include MetaProp and Allegion Ventures as co-leads, along with Singtel Innov8, Greycroft, and ANIMO Ventures … Incorta, the Direct Data Platform™, announced $120 million in Series D funding led by Prysm Capital, with participation from existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Kleiner Perkins, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Sorenson Capital, Telstra Ventures and Ron Wohl, as well as a credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. The round also included participation from new investor and strategic partner National Grid Ventures, which aims to accelerate Incorta’s expansion in the energy industry. Since Incorta’s founding in 2014, the company has raised $195 million in total funding. The latest round of funding will be used to expand go-to-market operations and meet global demand for Incorta’s unified data analytics platform … Tonkean, the Operating System for Business Operations, announced it has raised $50m in Series B funding, led by Accel. The funding will allow Tonkean to scale up hiring to its engineering and go-to-market teams and invest further in its no-code orchestration platform for business operations … Firebolt, the fast cloud data warehouse, purpose-built for delivering a new grade of analytic experiences over big data, announced a $127 million all-equity Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $164 million. The funds will enable the company to capitalize on the exploding demand from tech companies building data applications and interactive analytics over big data. Firebolt is a leading player in this highly demanding segment of the market, which is currently underserved. Funding will be used to further expand its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

In new M&A activity we learned … ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI), a global leader in modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence, today announced it has agreed to acquire Chorus.ai, a leader in Conversation Intelligence with some of the industry’s most advanced technology … SparkCognition, a leading infrastructure-focused artificial intelligence (AI) company, is pleased to announce it has acquired Maana, a leading digital knowledge platform company. Through this acquisition, SparkCognition gains Maana’s computational knowledge graph technology, its industrial expertise and customers such as Chevron, Shell, Aramco, and Airbus, expanding its Fortune Global 100 footprint with multi-year software agreements. SparkCognition’s AI platform combined with Maana’s digital knowledge technology will accelerate customers’ time to value in adopting AI-driven decision making across the enterprise … Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zerto, an industry leader in cloud data management and protection, in a transaction valued at $374 million. This acquisition expands HPE GreenLake and continues to deliver on HPE Storage’s shift to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business … TopFunnel, the AI-powered recruiting startup that high-growth companies use to scale, today announced the acquisition of Teamable to supercharge referral-based recruiting. Teamable is the employee referral platform that transforms social networks into high-performance talent pools … Copado, a leading DevOps platform powering the world’s largest digital transformations, announced an agreement to acquire Qentinel. Designed for both non-technical and code based developers, Qentinel provides robotic software testing for all major enterprise software platforms, including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. It is the only proven, enterprise-ready, AI-enabled testing solution for any cloud platform. This acquisition enables Copado customers to build and deploy the highest quality releases with less risk across multiple clouds. The transaction is pending final government approval and is expected to close by the end of fiscal Q3 2021 (Oct. 31, 2021) … Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501), acquired data management innovator Io-Tahoe, a subsidiary of the UK energy company Centrica. Founded in 2017, Io-Tahoe brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform, enabling data teams to collaborate and innovate faster … Fivetran, a leading automated data integration provider, announced the acquisition of Teleport Data, bringing a breakthrough innovation to the challenges of database replication. When trying to transfer data from a source location to a warehouse, it can be difficult to track changes and ensure data quality and consistency as source location data is constantly changing. Current solutions like snapshots – which essentially take a picture from one static point in time of that data – are slow and not real-time, while change data capture solutions that are log-based are hard to configure and set up. With Fivetran Teleport Sync, database replication is now simple like snapshots, delivering performance that in some cases approaches the speed of log-based systems, while being much less intrusive – making access to data easier across the organization.  

In people movement news we learned … Arity, a data analytics company with world’s largest driving behavior database for targeted marketing, has hired Min Shao as the new VP of Analytics. Min joins Arity with close to 30 years of analytics experience at some of the most notable tech brands across multiple industries. He has served as the Director of Engineering, Trust and Safety at YouTube; the Vice President of Engineering and Data Science at Yahoo; and an Analytics and Engineering Executive at both PayPal and FICO … Volta Industries, Inc. (Volta Charging), an industry leader in commerce-centric electric vehicle (EV) charging networks, announced today that David Klein, Ph.D., has joined as Senior Vice President and Chief Data Scientist. Dr. Klein previously served as Chief Scientist at 2Predict, Inc., a leader in machine-learning based analytics solutions. In this role, Dr. Klein will lead the team developing Volta Charging’s machine intelligent charging network capabilities, including predicting energy demand, anticipating consumer behavioral shifts and optimizing internal operations. Reporting to Praveen Mandal, Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Klein and his team will bring advanced data science expertise to lead Volta Charging in accelerating the company’s decision processes, creating unique intellectual property, developing automated predictive systems, intelligent interfaces and working to advance the industry at large.

We also have a number of new partnerships, alignments, and collaborations … PRophet, the AI-driven SaaS platform to help predict earned media interest, sentiment, and spread, announced an exclusive partnership with Podchaser, the world’s most comprehensive podcast database. The companies also agreed to a referral relationship whereby users will have an opportunity to have access to each other’s platforms at favorable terms. The integration of Podchaser’s robust data — including audience reach, creator and guest credits, detailed metadata, and more — into the PRophet platform will enable PRophet to apply its proprietary AI-driven analysis against thousands of high authority and highly ranked global podcasts, predicting for PRophet users which podcasts would most likely be interested in covering a pitch or interviewing a guest … MariaDB® Corporation announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to bring MariaDB SkySQL to the cloud, ensuring massive scalability and availability for businesses deploying high-performance database-as-a-service (DBaaS) on AWS. The collaboration enables deeper product integration and a go-to-market relationship that better serves joint MariaDB and AWS customers, and those enterprises ready to execute cloud modernization strategies … Narrative, the Data Streaming Platform that makes it easy to buy, sell and win, and Complementics, an international mobile audience data provider, today announced their partnership delivering Complementics’ proven mobile audience data, including location data, app audience data, cross-device data, and demographic data, to Narrative users worldwide. Narrative clients can now leverage Complementics’ solutions via the Narrative Data Streaming Platform … Anaconda announced further developments in their ongoing collaboration with Intel, as well as plans to continue expanding their strategic partnership for data science into the future. The companies are working together to build critical open-source data science packages, optimized for Intel technology, to make fast and scalable machine learning accessible for practitioners everywhere … Semtech Corporation (Nasdaq: SMTC), a leading supplier of high performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms, and SAS, a leader in massively parallel analytics and AI, are working together to deliver innovative Edge-to-Cloud IoT solutions that accelerate intelligent decisions for a smarter, safer planet. The end-to-end solutions incorporating LoRaWAN® connectivity with the industry leading SAS IoT analytics platform will simplify the development of IoT solutions that are focused on solving some of the biggest challenges facing the world today: natural disasters, hunger and sustainability … Parashift, a provider of modern, machine learning-powered Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) software, has just announced a solution partnership with BayBridgeDigital, a leading technology company headquartered in New York and specialized in Salesforce technologies, among others. The partnership enables Salesforce clients to automatically classify and capture any kind of documents, making data instantly actionable … AI pioneers DataRobot and Palantir Technologies Inc (NYSE: PLTR) announced a new partnership designed to create unique, agile, and real-time solutions to help solve the most pressing demand forecasting problems. Demand forecasting models are often outdated, rigid, and poorly equipped to deal with change. The speed in which supply chains, consumer demand, and shipping logistics have changed over the past year has forced organizations to rethink their approach when it comes to demand forecasting for the future. To support retailers in managing this challenge, DataRobot and Palantir have partnered to create a custom, newly developed framework that will empower companies to take on a more nimble strategy to demand forecasting, eliminating the time and resources spent on manual data cleansing and one-off manual modeling. The framework combines the best of Palantir Foundry and DataRobot model development capabilities to give customers the ability to create and test data-driven, easily updated forecasting models in minutes, not months, from a single platform. With a holistic view of the retail ecosystem, brands will be able to avoid previous blind spots, and make better and more impactful business decisions … Yugabyte, the company behind a leading distributed SQL database, announced a partnership and new integration with Hasura to deliver true cloud elasticity and ease of use for application development using GraphQL. The product integration allows Hasura Cloud customers to create a YugabyteDB cluster in a Yugabyte Cloud account and connect to it with a single click … Vecow Co., Ltd., a team of global embedded experts, announced its partnership with leading AI (Artificial Intelligence) chipmaker Hailo, to launch their next-generation AI solution, Vecow’s ABP-3000 AI computing system. Vecow’s ultra-slim AI solution features the compact Hailo-8™ AI accelerator module, enabling breakthrough performance and AI inference capabilities at the edge. The strategic collaboration enables not only a smart AI solution with best-in-class power productivity, but ecosystem deployment at the edge

Powered by the 8th generation Intel® Core i7/i5/i3 processor, the Vecow ABP-3000 AI can integrate multiple advanced Hailo-8™ AI accelerators with best-in-class power efficiency for fanless industrial-grade AI edge devices.

We also received a commentary about the recent Confluent IPO from Sean Knapp, CEO and founder of data engineering company Ascend.io:

“Recent, and accelerated growth in digital products and services has driven a growing interest in real-time data, with Apache Kafka becoming an integral part of many organizations’ data infrastructures, and Confluent’s continued, explosive growth is a testament to just how quickly that happened. As such, Confluent has impressively caught the attention of startups and the Fortune 500 alike, particularly as companies rely on data more than ever to fuel their digital business. With Confluent, Snowflake, and Databricks each delivering transformational capabilities for their respective users and enabling them to process greater volumes of data, it is essential that organizations take steps today to modernize their technology stack, take advantage of the benefits they provide, and focus on the next scaling challenge – data productivity and the ability to scale the volume of data products they produce.”

And finally, regarding new patent activity we heard … diwo announced that it was awarded six new patents in cognitive process and opportunity. These innovations are already part of the foundation of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based advisor for enterprise decisions, and further establish the company as a leader in the decision intelligence market. The six patents enable diwo’s solution to automatically sense business opportunities and risks from data and to use natural-language processing (NLP) to guide and make recommendations to front-line employees and managers, so they can make the best decisions faster. This “conversational” approach gives users direct access to the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Deep Learning Patent Update – provided by Nelson E. (Nick) Brestoff, J.D., M.S. Exec. Manager & Chief Inventor, Intraspexion LLC. As of July 6th, the deep learning Bar Chart crossed 600 patents for 2021, to 613. At the recent pace we’ll cross 700 by either the end of August or during August’s first week — and the graph for 2021 will probably top the total for 2020 by August.

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