Ocient מגייסת 49.4 מיליון דולר כדי להגדיל את יכולות מסד הנתונים היפר-סקאליות

Data warehouse provider Ocient, which specializes in large-scale data, has raised $49.4 million in new funding, the company announced today. This funding will help the company expand its capabilities for new industry use cases and meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The new funding brings the total amount raised by the company to $119 million.

Ocient was founded in 2016 by CEO Chris Gladwin after selling his previous company Cleversafe to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2015. The company's main goal is to build and provide a data analytics platform that can handle massive workloads, which may include trillions of rows of data. Ocient expanded its data platform in 2023 with machine learning and geospatial capabilities.

Ocient aims to differentiate itself from other data warehouse technologies like Snowflake by focusing on the largest data sets and enabling organizations to analyze them quickly to improve business outcomes. With the new funding, the company plans to further expand its offerings, with specific capabilities for various industries that require analysis of massive data sets.

When the company was founded, Gladwin laid out an initial 12-year plan for Ocient, which has been continuously updated. Now, eight years later, the foundational principles of Ocient remain intact.

"One of the basic tenets we had in the initial plan is that people working in organizations will want to analyze the ever-growing amount of data," Gladwin told VentureBeat. "It's not a huge revelation, but it turned out to be true."

Ocient Helping to Enable AI at Scale

One of Ocient's features is its ability to help organizations transform their data for use in AI and machine learning applications.

The process of converting raw data into a format suitable for advanced analytics techniques can be complex and time-consuming, especially when dealing with large-scale data systems like those of Ocient's clients.

Ocient operates in the telecom, advertising technology, and security markets, where organizations have large data sets that can contain trillions of data rows.

To overcome this challenge, Gladwin said that Ocient allows its users to preprocess and transform their data, making it available for AI and ML applications. The OcientML service announced in 2023 provides a suite of AI/ML functions that assist in cluster queries and regression operations.

An increasingly common approach for database providers to support generative artificial intelligence is to use embeddings and vectors. Ocient supports vectors as a basic data type for analytical purposes, including original linear algebra functionality. However, Ocient does not currently support the typically associated vector inference flow for Gen AI.

Ocient is indeed planning to add a similarity index to its roadmap, so it can support complex workflow processes of embedding and vector database implementation, including AI use cases for its clients in the future.

Ocient Set to Grow Vertical Focus

In terms of direction, Gladwin said the plan is to take Ocient's hyper-scale data warehouse to more vertical markets.

Until now, Ocient's core markets have included telco, security, adtech, and financial services. The company is now building capabilities for climate intelligence, which is becoming increasingly important for multiple use cases, including real estate, urban planning, and agriculture, among others.

"Climate intelligence is the ability to analyze climate and its impacts," Gladwin said. "Traditionally you needed a supercomputer to do something like that, and what we've demonstrated is that you can run it on a small cluster of inexpensive servers.