- Ocient, a Data Analytics Solutions (DAS) company that is developing ultra-large-scale relational database software, announced it raised $15 million in funding
Ocient, a Data Analytics Solutions (DAS) company that is developing ultra-large-scale relational database software and software-as-a-service for the largest datasets in the world, announced it raised an additional $15 million on top of the $10 million it announced in March 2018. This funding round was led by OCA Ventures with participation from In-Q-Tel.
The company was co-founded in March 2016 by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles. And 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. And it is deployed on industry-standard hardware or the public cloud and 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, and mission-critical insights that currently are only aspirational due to cost and performance limitations.
By transforming database architecture, the Ocient DAS has achieved performance levels that are significantly better than competitive products and runs on modern commodity hardware, utilizing massively parallel processing on large core-count systems. And it benchmarks at five to 1,000 times faster – and typically around 50 times faster – than “high-performance” alternatives such as Presto. Plus it is 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 an 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. And after achieving successful market adoption, Cleversafe was acquired by 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,” explained 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.”
The funding will be used for continued research and development, recruiting, business development, and sales efforts.
“In-Q-Tel is looking forward to partnering with Ocient in order to support the needs of our Intelligence and National Security partners,” commented Steve Bowsher, Managing General Partner and Executive Vice President at In-Q-Tel.
In 2020, Ocient hired 15 employees and 9 interns, bringing its employee count to over 50 with plans to more than double its headcount over the next year. And the company also announced additions to its management team and advisory board.
The management team now includes Kumar Abhijeet (Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing), Andrew Baptist (Vice President of Engineering), and Bill McCarthy (Chief Operating Officer). And the advisory board now includes Rebecca Taft (Staff Engineer at Cockroach Labs), Wilfried Schobeiri (Chief Technology and Chief Product Officer at MediaMath), and Craig Mohan (Chief Growth Officer at Trading Technologies).
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 the University of Chicago), Michael Franklin (Liew Family Chair of Computer Science at the University of Chicago), Jennie Rogers (Assistant professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University), Rob Gatto (Founder of Ureeka), Rob Grzywinski (Engineering at Ureeka), Masao Konomi (President at Konomi), Fran Landolf, (Founder & Principal of Core Consulting), Marc Price (Global CTO at Matrixx Software), Piers Nash (CEO & Founder at Sympatic), Harper Reed (Technologist & CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign), and Taylor Rhodes (CEO at Applied Systems, prior CEO at SMS Assist and Rackspace).
