GraphLab today announced it closed an $18.5 million Series B funding round led by Vulcan Capital with participation from Opus Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Madrona Venture Group. The company has also changed its name and brand from GraphLab to Dato, reflecting the evolution of its popular machine learning platform which now enables the creation of intelligent applications based on any type of data, including graphs, tables, text and images. Dato will use the investment to expand its business development, engineering and customer support teams to serve a rapidly growing customer base. The Series B round brings the total amount raised by Dato to $25.25 million. Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital will join Dato's board of directors.
Intelligent applications, built with the power of machine learning technologies, are changing the way companies drive revenue and deepen customer relationships. Marquee companies including Adobe, Zillow, PayPal and Cisco, among others, recognize the power of Dato's platform for building predictive applications such as item recommendations, sentiment analysis and fraud detection.
'Our company was founded on a mission to create a more intelligent world. The investments made in Dato will help us empower many more data scientists, software developers and engineers to revolutionize industries and enhance our lives in ways we can't imagine. We are delivering a complete environment that makes data science and its benefits accessible to every business,' said Carlos Guestrin, CEO, Dato.
Today's funding announcement comes on the heels of the release of Dato's first commercial offering, GraphLab Create. Born out of the popular open source GraphLab project, the underpinning of Dato's platform is a highly scalable machine learning engine optimized for production environments. Built on top of this engine is a broad set of solution toolkits and deployment options that provide a fast and easy way for data scientists and application developers to embed predictive capabilities into their applications. This means a shorter time to value for firms of any size with aspirations to unleash the power of machine learning across their data and applications.
'At Pandora, we use and investigate a lot of new machine learning and big data tools,' said Oscar Celma, director of research at Pandora. 'GraphLab Create helps us iterate on ideas for new product features faster and at large scale.'
'Dato is filling a huge market gap by bringing together the ease of use and computing scale that make it possible for one data scientist or developer to do the job of many. The company is growing, Dato's customers are innovating at an astonishing pace, and we are committed to the passionate group of people working to propel the field of intelligent applications forward,' Steve Hall, Managing Director, Vulcan Capital.
Dato is built on its strong community foundation with thousands of members, growing daily. Dato looks forward to uniting with its community at its annual conference taking place in San Francisco on July 21-22, 2015. For speaking submissions and more information visit: dato.com/events/conference15.
About Dato (formerly GraphLab)
Dato is the company behind the fastest and most complete platform for building predictive and intelligent applications. Started at Carnegie Mellon in 2009 as an open source project under the guidance of Carlos Guestrin, PhD., the software was initially intended for applying large scale machine learning to graph analysis. The functionality has since been much augmented to include tables, text, images and is now in broad use to make recommendations, detect fraud, score marketing content and generally deliver predictive capabilities at many notable e-tailers, service providers and Fortune 500 firms. Dato and its deeply experienced team of data scientists and technology veterans is based in Seattle. For more information, visit www.dato.com.
About Vulcan Capital
Vulcan Capital is the multi-billion dollar investment arm of Vulcan Inc., the company founded by Paul G. Allen to manage his philanthropic and business endeavors. The firm invests across all stages of corporate development including venture capital, growth equity and leveraged buyouts as well as investing in public equities and other liquid asset classes. Vulcan Capital's current portfolio spans a range of industry sectors, including technology, internet, mobile, life sciences, energy and natural resources, media and communications, and financial and information services. For more information, visit capital.vulcan.com
About Madrona Venture Group
Madrona ( www.madrona.com ) has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region's most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages nearly $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Isilon Systems, Sharebuilder, and World Wide Packets.
About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $13 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of successful investing includes more than 195 portfolio company IPOs and more than 320 acquisitions since its founding in 1977. In the U.S., NEA has offices in Menlo Park, CA; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.
About Opus Capital
Opus Capital was founded in 2005 and is based in Menlo Park, California. They have played an integral role, investing capital and expertise, in more than 80 successful companies, including 50 IPOs. They manage over $1 billion in venture capital. For more information, see www.opuscapitalventures.com.