Ocient Secures $49.4 Million, Total at $119 Million

Ocient Holdings LLC closed $49.4 million in funding.

This latest raise is an extension of its series B financing, previously led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures, and includes new venture investors Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital, and Wolf Capital Management, as well as all prior major investors.

This latest raise will be used to advance product capabilities and deliver hyperscale data analytics solutions to firm’s growing global customer base. Including this current round, the company has raised a total of $119 million in invested capital since its founding in 2016.

It saw 109% Y/Y growth in revenue in its last fiscal year as more organizations seek end-to-end software solutions capable of delivering all-the-time, compute-intensive analysis of large, complex datasets while optimizing for performance, cost, and energy efficiency.

The start-up also made its debut in the GigaOm Radar for Data Warehouses report, named as a Fast Mover and Challenger in its inaugural placement. Its Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA), which removes network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access, was called out as a key strength for the disruptor, along with its always-on loading and data transformations (ETL/ELT), Zero Copy Reliability and in-database OcientML and OcientGeo capabilities, all of which deliver enhanced performance alongside energy and cost efficiencies for next-generation data analysis at growth-scale.

“Organizations are being challenged to deliver energy efficient hyper-growth data analysis without accelerating costs, which has become increasingly challenging as real-time analytics, SQL, AI/ML, and geospatial workloads typically require more energy consumption,” said Chris Gladwin, CEO. “The close of this latest round of financing is an indication that the need for the solutions we bring to market is growing across industries, and geographies.”

“The world is connected through data, and a growing number of organizations are grappling with growing, complex datasets that are challenging the status quo of their existing systems,” said Jim Dugan, founding managing partner of OCA Ventures. “Ocient’s unique approach to enabling the analysis of these always-on, compute-intensive datasets while optimizing for performance, cost, and energy efficiency is a win-win for businesses and the environment, and OCA Ventures is thrilled to be a part of this next chapter of Ocient’s growth as it delivers its data analytics software solutions to a growing number of customers around the globe.”

The growth of compute-intensive data workloads is increasing the need for digital solutions that can positively impact energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. In the Gartner Top Trends in Data and Analytics, 2023 report, regarding D&A sustainability, “If current D&A and AI practices remain unchanged, and with their ongoing adoption, the energy needed for machine learning alone may grow to 3.5% of global electricity consumption by 2030.”

The research recommends data and analytics leaders “adopt emerging practices to improve the energy efficiency of D&A and AI. These include the prioritized use of (cloud) data centers that are powered by renewable energy, the use of more energy efficient infrastructure, and the use of transfer learning, active learning, federated learning, composite AI and other approaches. Their benefits include less need for (training) data and more efficient machine learning, lower requirements for time, compute resources and energy.”

* Minimized time, compute and energy consumption are all benefits Ocient delivers.

“The demand for computing power and storage space in data centers will continue to increase rapidly and cloud providers are struggling to buy enough clean energy to balance their growth making decarbonization solutions for this sector hugely important for the future of our global climate,” said Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing partner of Buoyant Ventures. “Buoyant Ventures invests in organizations creating high-impact digital solutions in our fight against climate change. Ocient’s highly differentiated approach to delivering energy-efficient data analytics software solutions is a compelling fit, and we’re excited to see how the company continues to innovate and lead the way in this space.“

*Gartner, Top Trends in Data and Analytics, 2023, published 28 March 2023.