Dataiku Captures $400 Million Series E Round Funding to Grow Its Data Science and ML Platform
Data science platform maker Dataiku has reeled in another $400 million in venture capital, giving it nearly $647 million in funding since it was founded in 2012. This latest $400 million, which comes in as a Series E Round, arrives as the startup now has a market capitalization of $4.6 billion.
The fresh cash infusion gives the company a sizable bankroll to continue its quest to democratize AI and advanced analytics, while helping customers fight what CEO Florian Douetteau calls the “FAANG mafia” -- a reference to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google's Alphabet parent -- which make up the world's five biggest tech stocks.
Dataiku focuses its product development efforts on creating enterprise AI solutions that can be used by data and business analysts, as opposed to strictly being used by highly trained data scientists, who are expensive and hard to find. The world is still millions of data scientists short of meeting the demand for data scientists, and Dataiku is determined to help make up the difference by creating better tools that give data analyst and regular business users the ability to work with data and create AI products.
Florian Douetteau of Dataiku
“We differentiate by providing a collaborative visual data experience, for ML, data preparation, visualization, and ML operations and optimization,” Douetteau told Datanami in a June interview. “We bill the product as a product usable by a very large audience, meaning the analysts, meaning people with essentially business skills, and then onboarding…the data engineers and data scientists [to do their work].”
In prior ages, data scientists were required to build big data and AI applications. But automation in the data exploration and model development tools means full-blown data scientists are needed only 10 percent to 20 percent of the time, according to Douetteau.
“Lots of things can be done within the realm of AI and analytics without having the need of the data scientist in the room,” he said. “And even if you need them in some situations, you don’t’ need them for the whole journey. I think that’s one important aspect.”
The company's Series E Round investors include Tiger Global and existing investors ICONIQ Growth, CapitalG, FirstMark Capital, Battery Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Dawn Capital. The round also included new investors, including Insight Partners, Eurazeo, Lightrock and Olivier Pomel, the CEO of Datadog.
This was Dataiku’s biggest funding round since April 2020, when the company announced a $100 million Series D led by Stripes. It cleared a $101 million Series C in December 2018 led by ICONIQ Capital.
Read the rest of this article at our sister website, Datanami.
