Data science company Iguazio Systems Ltd. today announced a $24 million round of funding that brings its total amount raised to $72 million.

INCapital Ventures led the round, which is an extension of Iguazio’s earlier Series B rounds. Also participating are existing and new investors that include Samsung SDS, Kensington Capital Partners, Plaza Ventures and Silverton Capital Ventures.

Iguazio co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Yaron Haviv (pictured) told SiliconANGLE that the money will be used to grow sales and facilitate additional sales channels, which include integrators and companies such as Dell Technologies Inc.

Iguazio sells a “serverless” data platform-as-a-service product that creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the network edge as well as on public clouds and in on-premises data centers. It works by consolidating data into a repository and making it available to the applications that need it, as files, messages, streams and forms. Data can be analyzed on site without sending it back to the cloud, thereby enabling much faster insights.

To simplify processing of data, Iguazio relies on technologies including big data and machine learning software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow and Kubernetes, which manages software “containers” that allow applications to run the same on many different computing environments.

The “serverless” aspect of Iguazio’s platform, powered by its open-source Nuclio framework, is important because it means users don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, such as servers and storage. Nuclio also helps reduce bandwidth constraints by aggregating data before sending it to the cloud.

Using the Iguazio platform, data scientists can easily create real-time artificial intelligence applications, the company says. Its platform has already seen widespread adoption in industry verticals such as financial services and telecommunications. For example, its latest marquee customer is Payoneer Inc., which offers a global digital payment platform and uses Iguazio’s software for predicting and preventing fraud in real time, not just for predicting the likelihood of fraud.

Haviv said Iguazio is seeing more customer adoption, and is using the Series B round extension to expand its efforts to get more customers into full production. Although it’s a sizable round for a Series B, he said, “we don’t want to raise too much money because the valuation of the company will rise significantly once those projects turn into actual business.”

Haviv talked more about the company’s platform in this interview with Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, in November:

The new funding round is timely because Iguazio said it’s seeing an increasing demand for real-time AI applications. It cites data from research firm Gartner Inc. that says AI augmentation alone will create “$2.9 trillion of business value” in 2021.

But it reckons enterprises will have trouble tapping into this value because it remains incredibly challenging for some to transform their AI models into fully operational AI applications that can actually deliver business value. That’s where Iguazio reckons it can help.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: SiliconANGLE