Tamr raises $10 million for AI-powered data analytics Posted on : Sep 18 - 2018

Big data analytics might not be the most exciting application of artificial intelligence (AI), but there’s a lot of money in it — as much as $42 billion, according to Statista. So it’s not exactly surprising that startups like Tamr, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that leverages AI to speed up analytics workflows, continue to rake in the capital.

Tamr announced today that it has closed a $10 million round with participation from Pear Tree Partners and Granite Hill Capital Partners. It also announced the appointment of four new board observers: John McClellan, a partner at Pear Tree Partners; Masataka Otomo at SBI Investment; Hyuk-Jeen Suh, head of East Coast for Samsung Ventures; and Mona Vernon, chief technology officer of Thomson Reuters Labs.

The funds will fuel future growth, cofounder and CEO Andy Palmer told VentureBeat.

“We’ve had a record start to 2018,” Palmer said. “With our round of funding now complete and the addition of four highly experienced new board observers, we’re on track to continue our rapid growth as we redefine how companies solve previously intractable data unification challenges.”

Tamr’s full stack, AI-powered software solution unifies disparate datasets by generating a “table of contents” for data. Cofounder Mike Stonebraker of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory first proposed the idea in a paper about a “data tamer system” for large-scale curation. The software runs on-premises or in the cloud and uses algorithms to identify relationships between data sources and identify domain experts who can integrate those sources in the most effective way possible.

“Our mission when we founded the company … was to enable large enterprises to unify key data to realize maximum strategic and operational benefit,” Palmer told VentureBeat an email interview this summer. “DataOps — our vision for how enterprises can reinvent the way they manage data to accelerate digital transformation — is fast becoming a reality and driving widespread adoption of Tamr’s best-of-breed data unification solutions.”

Customers include Novartis, Thomson Reuters, GE, Toyota, and GSK, which pay about $300,000 for a two-year license.

Tamr, which launched in 2014 at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference in San Francisco, in July closed an $18 million funding round from SBI Investment, Intage Open Innovation Fund, Samsung Ventures, Fenox Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and others. To date, it has raised more than $68 million from Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, SineWave Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, and others. Source