Ocient, the hyperscale data warehouse vendor, has recently secured $49.4 million in funding to expand its capabilities for new industry use cases and meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI). This brings the total amount raised by the company to $119 million.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Chris Gladwin, Ocient aims to deliver a data analytics platform that can scale to hyperscale workloads. The company’s platform can handle trillions of rows of data and has recently been expanded to include machine learning and geospatial capabilities.
One of Ocient’s key features is its ability to help organizations transform their data for use in AI and machine learning applications. Processing and transforming raw data into a usable format for advanced analytics can be complex and time-consuming, especially with large datasets. Ocient enables users to preprocess and transform their data, making it readily available for AI and ML applications. The company’s OcientML service provides AI/ML functions that assist with clustering and regression query operations.
While Ocient currently supports vector analysis and native linear algebra functionality, it does not yet support vector embedding workflows commonly associated with generative AI. However, the company has plans to add a similarity index to its roadmap, enabling support for massive vector-embedding database workflows and AI use cases in the future.
Ocient is also expanding its focus on different industry verticals, such as telco, security, adtech, financial services, and climate intelligence. The company aims to provide capabilities for analyzing climate and its effects, which traditionally required supercomputers. Ocient has demonstrated that it can run climate intelligence analyses on a small cluster of inexpensive servers.
With the new funding, Ocient plans to further expand its offerings and develop specific capabilities for different industry verticals that require the analysis of massive datasets.
Overall, Ocient’s mission is to enable organizations to analyze ever-growing amounts of data rapidly and improve business outcomes. As CEO Chris Gladwin stated, this founding premise remains intact, and the company continues to drive innovation in the hyperscale data warehouse space.