On Monday, Chicago-based data analytics startup Ocient announced the completion of its $40 million Series B funding round. This funding comes less than a year after the company raised its $15 million round in June of 2020, and brings its total capital raised to $65 million.
This new funding will help Ocient grow its team. In June, the company said it had plans to double its employee headcount over the course of a year. At the time it had about 50 employees.
About half a year later and it seems like Ocient is half way to achieving that goal, with about 75 employees currently. But with this new announcement, Ocient is moving the goalposts even more ambitiously, aiming to hit 150 by the end of 2021 — effectively tripling its size from where it was seven months ago. The company specifically said it’ll focus on growing its engineering, customer success, operations, sales and marketing teams.
This continued growth is a sign of Ocient’s recent success. The company has created a database and analytics software platform that allows companies to process huge amounts of data. This data is measured in petabytes, which is equivalent to one million gigabytes. Ocient also advertises that its software can analyze data much faster than the competition. Its data analytics solution can hold quadrillions of rows of data and compute across trillions of them per second. When you’re an organization with this much data, processing speed is very important.
“Organizations are struggling to keep up with today’s data demands, a challenge that will only continue to increase exponentially,” CEO Chris Gladwin said in a statement. “With Ocient technology, organizations can tap into every piece of data now and in the future, unleashing massive new enterprise value.”
Gladwin is one of Chicago’s more well-known serial entrepreneurs. He gained attention after founding Cleversafe, and then selling the company to IBM for $1.3 billion. He co-founded Ocient with Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles in 2016.
