Datameer raises $40 million for data set prep and analysis tools

Datameer, a decade-old San Francisco-based company developing an end-to-end platform for data prep and analytics lifecycle management, today revealed that it’s secured a $40 million funding round led by ST Telemedia (STT). This latest tranche saw contributions from Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Nextworld Capital, Citi Ventures, and Top Tier Capital Partners, and it brings the company’s total venture capital raised to roughly $140 million following a $14.7 million venture series in April 2017 and a $40 million series E in 2015.

CEO Christian Rodatus said the influx of funds will accelerate the development of Neebo, a software as a service (SaaS) product designed to enable teams to create, use, and share analytics assets. It formally launches today with customers including Deutsche Bank, Scotiabank, BMO, Akbank, CloudCover, Siemens, Anthem BlueCross, Optum, and RBC.

“Neebo virtualizes these complex landscapes, without moving data and other assets, and helps a community of analytics professionals create and find assets, combine them, and publish them to any BI or data science tool,” said Rodatus. “Neebo is a SaaS solution that enables analytics professionals to kickstart a project in minutes and helps them immediately decrease time-to-insight. Further, AI-enabled discovery and blending builds a searchable repository of trusted assets to further boost analyst performance.”

Datameer’s premiere schema- and code-free offering, Datameer X, runs on-premises or in the cloud and draws on a collection of over 70 connectors, an SDK, and an API to ingest data from enterprise corpora. It’s able to transform, blend, and enrich that data while filtering out corrupt entries using a spreadsheet-like tool with over 270 prebuilt functions, the results of which it optionally exports to data warehouses and on-premises databases.

Datameer X boasts built-in functions for data extraction, text analytics, and geo-location mapping in addition to de-duping and custom functions coded in Java. It generates an initial representative data sample that’s constantly resampled based on inputs, which together with proprietary algorithms help to identify patterns within data like behavior groupings and relationships.

The suite spotlights data attributes like dependencies, shape, quality, and clusters through visualizations such as histograms, and it supports monitoring and job scheduling on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis. Basic governance features like roles, permissions, and single sign-on are in tow, as well as tracking and reporting capabilities courtesy data lineage and audit trails.

As for Neebo, it similarly connects data sources like business apps, data warehouses, and local storage to imbue files with AI-driven searchability and discoverability. It offers a point-and-click workflow with data combining, cleaning, and appending functions for creating analytic assets that can be shared to business intelligence and data science tools, as well as a distributed query optimizer that ensures high throughput and fast response time to interactive queries.

Datameer pitches its products as robust solutions for marketing campaign optimization, customer segmentation, fraud detection, product optimization, and other such applications across segments such as financial services, retail, telecom, and health care. It claims that Datameer X alone leads to a 25 times boost in engineering efficiency and three times faster analytics cycles on average.

Those bold claims position it favorably against competitors like Dataiku, a startup developing a cloud-based big data analysis platform that’s raised nearly $150 million to date; Unreal, which offers a full-stack data operations platform that addresses everything from data ingestion and migration to processing and transforming; and Incorta, the provider of a hyperconverged analytics platform that pulls in data from various cloud-based applications. It’s anticipated that the big data as a service market will be worth $51.9 billion by 2025, assuming the current trend holds.

“With our focus on hyperscale data centers and solutions that promote workload migration to the cloud, we are thrilled to see a product like Neebo come to market, that will bridge analytics in the on-premises and cloud worlds to drastically increase analyst productivity,” said CEO of STT Stephen Miller. “We are also proud that the Datameer team is innovating at a rapid pace and has already filed five patents for Neebo to bring a highly differentiated product to market.”

CloudCover CEO Vishal Parpia, an early Neebo customer, added, “Neebo saves [our customers] a costly migration exercise by unifying disparate data sources without having to copy and duplicate data. It allows us to focus on higher value services and our customers love us for it.”