CHICAGO, June 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ocient, a Data Analytics Solutions (DAS) company that is building ultra-large-scale relational database software and software-as-a-service for the world’s largest datasets, announced today that it has raised an additional $15 million on top of the $10 million it announced in March 2018. This investment, led by Chicago-based OCA Ventures and with participation by In-Q-Tel, Inc., will support continued research and development, recruiting, business development and sales efforts.
Co-founded in March 2016 by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles, Ocient will transform how organizations analyze immense amounts of data with unmatched price/performance levels.
The Ocient DAS can hold quadrillions of rows of data, ingress billions of rows per second, and filter and compute trillions of rows per second. Deployed on industry-standard hardware or the public cloud, it is built for organizations where NoSQL databases and Hadoop fall short of their needs for:
- Complex SQL and intra-database machine learning on multi-petabyte scale-out datasets.
- Interactive query response time and second to sub-second data latency.
- Mission critical insights that currently are only aspirational due to cost and performance limitations.
By fundamentally rethinking database architecture, the Ocient DAS has achieved performance levels that are orders of magnitude better than competitive products and runs on modern commodity hardware utilizing massively parallel processing on large core-count systems:
- Benchmarks at five to 1,000 times faster – and typically around 50 times faster – than “high-performance” alternatives like Presto.
- 1,000 times faster than leading MPP, NoSQL and Hadoop-based databases when querying a large dataset (with same hardware, queries and data).
- Analytics that once took one hour now take 10 seconds or less.
“The exponential growth of data will make today’s big data solutions woefully inadequate for organizations’ analytics needs in the not-too-distant future,” said Gladwin. “Ocient is purpose-built for gaining insights in interactive time from the data tsunami every enterprise is tackling not just now, but for many years into the future.”
OCA Ventures, which led the round, was the first institutional investor in Gladwin’s prior startup, Cleversafe, a leading developer of object storage software and systems. After achieving successful market adoption, Cleversafe would eventually sell to IBM for over $1.3 billion in 2015.
“As an early stage venture investor, OCA Ventures is committed to backing brilliant innovators as they commercialize upon dramatic marketplace opportunities. Entrepreneurs are central to OCA Ventures’ investment philosophy, and we are thrilled to partner again with Chris, Joe and George,” said OCA Ventures’ Founding Managing Partner, Jim Dugan, who joined Ocient’s Board of Directors. “Chris’ experience helping organizations cost-effectively and reliably store ultra large data provides Ocient a unique vantage point for understanding how organizations are struggling to actively analyze massive data sets.”
Also participating in the funding round is In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor to the U.S. Intelligence and National Security community.
Steve Bowsher, Managing General Partner and Executive Vice President at In-Q-Tel, said, “In-Q-Tel is looking forward to partnering with Ocient in order to support the needs of our Intelligence and National Security partners.”
Team and Advisory Board Additions
So far in 2020, Ocient has hired 15 employees and nine interns, bringing its employee count to over 50, with plans to more than double its headcount over the next year. The company also announced additions to its management team and advisory board.
Management Team
- Kumar Abhijeet, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing
- Prior, spent 11 years at Cleversafe/IBM. At Cleversafe, he grew the company from pre-revenue through its sale to IBM and held various sales leadership positions within IBM’s Cloud Object Storage business.
- Prior, spent 11 years at Cleversafe/IBM. At Cleversafe, he grew the company from pre-revenue through its sale to IBM and held various sales leadership positions within IBM’s Cloud Object Storage business.
- Andrew Baptist, Vice President of Engineering
- Prior, spent 12 years at Cleversafe/IBM. At Cleversafe, he led the research team as Vice President of Technology and was Distinguished Engineer at IBM after the Cleversafe acquisition.
- Prior, spent 12 years at Cleversafe/IBM. At Cleversafe, he led the research team as Vice President of Technology and was Distinguished Engineer at IBM after the Cleversafe acquisition.
- Bill McCarthy, Chief Operating Officer
- Prior, spent 10 years with ShopperTrak, an analytics vendor leveraging IoT and servicing the retail industry, where he served as GM Americas, CEO EMEA and CTO. Previously, Bill served as VP of Technology then COO at ShopLocal.
Advisory Board
- Rebecca Taft, Staff Engineer at Cockroach Labs
- Member of the SQL query optimizer team. Prior, she was a graduate student at MIT, where she worked with Michael Stonebraker researching distributed database elasticity and multi-tenancy.
- Member of the SQL query optimizer team. Prior, she was a graduate student at MIT, where she worked with Michael Stonebraker researching distributed database elasticity and multi-tenancy.
- Wilfried Schobeiri, Chief Technology and Chief Product Officer at MediaMath
- Leads development of MediaMath’s digital marketing platform, which powers the operations of thousands of marketers.
- Leads development of MediaMath’s digital marketing platform, which powers the operations of thousands of marketers.
- Craig Mohan, Chief Growth Officer at Trading Technologies
- Prior, served as CME Group’s Managing Director of Market Technology and Data Services.
Rebecca, Wil and Craig are joined by an existing group of Sales & Marketing and Technology Advisory Board members that include:
- Boris Glavic, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology
- Aaron Elmore, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago
- Michael Franklin, Liew Family Chair of Computer Science at University of Chicago
- Jennie Rogers, Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University
- Rob Gatto, Founder, Ureeka
- Rob Grzywinski, Engineering, Ureeka
- Masao Konomi, President, Konomi, Inc.
- Fran Landolf, Founder & Principal of Core Consulting
- Marc Price, Global CTO, Matrixx Software
- Piers Nash, CEO & Founder, Sympatic Inc.
- Harper Reed, Technologist & CTO, Obama 2012 campaign
- Taylor Rhodes, CEO at Applied Systems, prior CEO at SMS Assist and Rackspace
About Ocient
Ocient is building database and analytics software and services to enable rapid analysis of the world’s largest datasets. To learn more about Ocient, please visit http://www.ocient.com/.
Media Contact: Josh Inglis, josh@propllr.com, 312.504.7677
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/234c7f2e-26e2-483e-af2f-af09c41ca95b