“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 6/23/2022

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.

Tuesday was the Summer solstice, so welcome to the Summer of Data Science! Let’s get started with some new funding news … Ataccama, a leading unified data management platform provider, announced it has received $150 million in growth capital from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, representing a minority investment in the company. The funds will be used to strengthen its go-to-market engine, further invest in new product innovation and expand its global reach. These efforts will allow Ataccama to build on its significant growth and cement its position at the forefront of the data management and governance sectors … dotData,  a leading company focused on delivering full-cycle data science automation and operationalization for the enterprise announced that it has raised $31.6 million in Series B funding, bringing the total amount of funding raised to date to $74.6 million. The Series B financing round was led by OTSUKA CORPORATION, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Limited … Neuron7.ai, a leading innovator in AI-powered customer and field service software, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Bill Binch, Operating Partner at Battery Ventures, will help accelerate the company’s growth by joining its board of directors … Accelario, a DataOps leader speeding digital transformation and eliminating the “Database Bottleneck,” has raised $10 million in its latest round, with a total of $16 million to date … Ahana, the Software as a Service for Presto, announced an additional investment of $7.2 million from Liberty Global Ventures with participation from existing investor GV, extending the company’s Series A financing to $27.2 million. Liberty Global is a world leader in converged broadband, video and mobile communications services. This brings the total amount of funding raised to date to $32 million … DataStax, the real-time data company, announced that it has secured $115 million in funding led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs), with participation from RCM Private Markets fund advised by Rokos Capital Management (US) LP, Singapore-based global investor, EDB Investments Pte. Ltd. and DataStax’s existing investors including Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, OnePrime Capital, and other current investors. DataStax will use the funding to accelerate the global expansion and development of its Astra DB multi-cloud database and its Astra Streaming streaming service, which are part of the company’s open data stack for building and running real-time applications on any cloud, at massive scale, anywhere in the world, with zero downtime … Domino Data Lab, provider of the leading Enterprise MLOps platform trusted by over 20% of the Fortune 100, announced an investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of Snowflake, the Data Cloud company … Continual, a next-generation AI platform for the modern data stack, today announces $14.5 million in Series A funding and general availability of its cloud platform. The round was led by Innovation Endeavors, a firm that invests in visionary founders, transformational technology and emergent ecosystems for a new world. The round was joined by Amplify Partners, Illuminate Ventures, Inspired Capital, Data Community Fund, Activation, New Normal, GTMfund, and angels Tomer Shiran, the founder of Dremio, and Tristan Handy, the founder of dbt Labs … Meltano announced it has raised an additional $8.2 million. This brings its total Seed Round funding to $12.4 million with plans to further extend the project’s capabilities. The funding round was led by Venrock, with additional participation by Alphabet’s GV, Uncorrelated Ventures, Data Tech Fund and numerous angel investors … Paravision, a leader in trusted Vision AI, announced that it has received funding from a Five Eyes government partner to develop technology capable of detecting so-called “deepfake” videos. The yearlong program will leverage Paravision’s industry-leading Vision AI expertise to build software capable of detecting several types of digital face manipulations … Immuta, a leader in data access and data security, announced that it has secured $100 million in Series E funding. With this investment, Immuta will meet growing data security and privacy demands by accelerating secure data access across all cloud platforms. Only Immuta can automate access to data by discovering, securing, and monitoring data on any cloud service. The new investment brings Immuta’s total financing to date to $267 million … Stellate, formerly known as GraphCDN, is bringing its expertise in GraphQL APIs to the masses with the help of a $25 million Series A from Tiger Global and a $5 million seed round led by boldstart ventures. Stellate will use the raise to build the global data graph by connecting the world’s GraphQL APIs to enable innovation, efficiencies, and cost savings on a scale never before seen … Rivery announced it has raised $30M in our Series B funding round to continue its mission of empowering data teams to easily solve complex data challenges and enabling organizations to scale at hyperspeed. 

In M&A activity we learned … Anaconda Inc., provider of the popular data science platform, announced that it has acquired PythonAnywhere, a cloud-based Python development and hosting environment. As a fully-fledged, cloud-based Python development environment, PythonAnywhere removes the heavy burden of infrastructure management and empowers Python developers to simply create web applications within a cloud-based Python environment—a critical component to collaborating and sharing within dispersed teams … GrubMarket announced it has completed the acquisition of San Carlos, California-based QBIX Analytics (“QBIX”), a trusted data analytics and business intelligence solution provider that specializes in implementing data solutions and performing system integrations to help customers improve sales and operational efficiencies.

We also heard of a number of new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … Visionary.ai, a developer of software-based image signal processor (ISP) technology, and Innoviz (NASDAQ: INVZ), a leading provider of high-performance, automotive-grade LiDAR sensors and perception software, today announced a new partnership to combine Visionary.ai’s imaging technology with Innoviz’s LiDAR sensors and perception software. Combined, the two technologies aim to improve 3D machine vision performance for a wide range of applications including robotics, smart cities, and drones … Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions, announced its partnership with Wasabi Technologies, the cloud storage company. The partnership enables a fast, reliable, and efficient solution for hybrid cloud storage, archiving, and backup that allows organizations to deploy and manage hundreds of locations efficiently with cloud-like orchestration. Wasabi offers a low-cost cloud storage target for mass data collection on Scale Computing’s IT infrastructure software platform so companies can collect and retain data where it is needed, when it is needed … Netradyne, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing focusing on driver and fleet safety, announced a partnership with Boyle Transportation, a specialized transportation logistics provider for life sciences and defense companies. Through the partnership, Boyle Transportation will deploy Netradyne’s vision-based Driver•i safety camera platform throughout its fleet of vehicles …  ThoughtSpot, the Modern Analytics Cloud company, and Matillion, a leading enterprise cloud data integration platform announced their joint partnership to provide data model templates and Live Analytics to help data teams working in the cloud get up-to-date data insights in minutes … ZeroEyes, Inc., creators of the only A.I.-based gun detection video analytics platform that holds the US Department of Homeland Security SAFETY Act Designation, announced a formal partnership with Asylon Robotics, a firm that automates security operations by leveraging aerial and ground robotics for perimeter and drone security and intelligence services … Covestro, one of the world’s leading polymer companies, and QC Ware, a leading quantum software and services company, announced the signing of a five-year collaboration agreement. The objective of the collaboration is to help prepare Covestro to fully deploy quantum algorithms for the discovery of new materials and catalysts on near-term quantum hardware. 

In the customer wins category we have … Mendix, a Siemens business and global leader in modern enterprise application development, announced that PVH Europe, home to the global headquarters of Tommy Hilfiger and European offices of Calvin Klein, has selected the Mendix low-code platform. The organization leveraged the platform to create an innovative suite of applications to more efficiently manage and track marketing budgets, chargeback, on- and off-board temporary and external employees, manage project calendars and streamline customer service … Couchbase, Inc. (NASDAQ: BASE), provider of a leading modern database for enterprise applications, announced that Nexon, a global leader in Virtual World games and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) selected Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) for greater developer agility. With Capella, Nexon achieved a faster time to market with its launch of Blue Archive, a new game first released in Korea in November 2021 … KX, a leader in real-time streaming analytics, announced that the Montréal Exchange (MX), a recognized self-regulatory organization, has implemented its multi-asset trade surveillance solution to combat market abuse and enable further global growth. MX, Canada’s derivatives exchange and a wholly-owned subsidiary of TMX Group, leverages KX Surveillance and its robust trading surveillance, analytics and visualization platform to ingest high volume data — both real-time and file-based — quickly and reliably. This ability, coupled with its flexibility and performance, improves detection quality and accuracy and positions MX’s Regulatory Division for greater operational success and scale … Qlik® announced that it has helped SEGA Corporation to become more data-driven. The leading gaming company streamlined its mobile game business with Qlik Sense®, generating faster and deeper gamer insights to better engage with mobile phone gamers … Speechmatics, a leading speech recognition technology scaleup, announced that ENCO – a global innovator of automated broadcast and AV production workflow solutions – has chosen its Autonomous Speech Recognition (ASR) technology for ENCO’s new enCaption5 automated captioning and transcription solution. This partnership will enable AV professionals, content producers, and broadcasters to create highly accurate transcripts, adding closed or open captions to both live and pre-recorded AV content regardless of the speaker’s demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect or location. 

In people movement news we heard … Signal AI, a leading global decision augmentation company – turning the world’s data into knowledge and empowering business leaders across a range of industries to make informed and confident decisions – announced the appointment of Dr. Alexandre Pinto as SVP of Data Science. With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Alexandre Pinto is one of the leading practitioners in AI and data science today. During his impressive tenure in data science, he has designed and delivered data & AI strategies, governance, products and services for companies including Outra and Accenture. Dr. Alexandre Pinto holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the NOVA School of Science and Technology at the NOVA University of Lisbon … Roots Automation, a global intelligent automation company, announced the addition of Ratish Dalvi to its executive team as Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In his new role, Dalvi will lead the data science and machine learning team to further advance the breadth and depth of Roots Automation’s market-leading AI capabilities – specifically around Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) – enabling customers to automate a wider range of complex business processes … Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company, announced it has named Ryan Sousa as Vice President of Data & Analytics. Sousa will lead the four-year-old Data & Analytics practice and partner with clients to accelerate their data, analytics and AI journey offering strategy, implementation, operations and staffing services that build on other Pivot Point’s services, including EHR, ERP, virtual care and IT strategy … Lumeo, a designer of computer vision solutions, is pleased to welcome Andrew Cianciosi to our expanding team as Head of Sales. Andrew has a proven track record in technical sales for large enterprises and national accounts, specializing in physical security and cloud-hosted access control and CCTV solutions … Boomi™, the intelligent connectivity and automation leader, announced the appointment of Madeline Ling as chief financial officer (CFO), Marcy Campbell as chief revenue officer (CRO), and Fran Wilson as chief marketing officer (CMO), effective immediately. Additionally, Emmy award-winning news journalist Christa Delcamp joins Boomi to support public relations and media strategy, and James Dyson joins the company to lead Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Talent Acquisition … Couchbase announced it has promoted Huw Owen to Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Owen has served as a leader of Couchbase’s international sales business for nearly four years, where he played a significant role in accelerating Couchbase’s growth, including increasing international ARR by nearly 200%. Prior to Couchbase, Mr. Owen held various international sales leadership roles at Veritas, Symantec, Lenovo and Good Technology … Scale AI announced former Uber VP and Head of Mobility for the US and Canada, Dennis Cinelli has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer. As the first CFO for Scale, Cinelli will oversee strategic finance, accounting and corporate development … Torch.AI, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) powered ultra-high speed data processing, is proud to announce that Jennifer Utting has recently joined the company as General Counsel. Utting plays a vital role as the company continues to experience a rising portfolio of customers, creating an increased demand for legal guidance and navigation through complex matters … Panzura LLC, a market leader in hybrid multi-cloud data management, has appointed David Wigglesworth as its new Global VP of Sales. David will be responsible for building and managing an expanding global sales team as the company continues to build on the success of its “refounding” in 2020, spearheaded by CEO Jill Stelfox and CRO Dan Waldschmidt … Unissant Inc., an industry leader in data and advanced analytics solutions for health and national security, welcomes Vishal Deshpande as the company’s Chief Data Analytics Officer. Vishal will be responsible for leading and establishing Unissant’s Data & Advanced Analytics technical vision, strategy, roadmap, execution, and implementation. Vishal will also lead innovation and adoption of leading-edge technologies for current and future customer needs such as AI/ML, ML Ops, DataOps and Data Mesh as well as lead development and deployment of technology assets in the data and advanced analytics domain … ScaleFlux, a leader in deploying SSDs with Computational Storage at scale, announced that Saeed Raja has joined the company as vice president, reporting to CEO and co-founder Dr. Hao Zhong.

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