Hyperscale data processing and analytics startup Ocient Inc. said today it has closed on a bumper $49.4 million round of funding to advance its products and expand its customer base.

The round is an extension of its previous $40 million Series B round of funding led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures in January 2021, and includes new investors Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital and Wolf Capital Management. All told, Ocient has now raised $119 million since its founding in 2016.

Ocient provides hyperscale data warehouse and analytics software to help enterprises perform massively parallelized processing of enormous amounts of data. This enables its customers to obtain real-time insights from trillions of data records at once. It can do this thanks to the unique design of its data warehouse architecture, where compute is adjacent to storage on NVMe solid-state drives.

The advantage of Ocient’s compute adjacent storage architecture is it eliminates network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access. In addition, Ocient says, it has built an intra-database extract, transact and load tool powered by machine learning to help transform, load and analyze data queries at incredibly high speeds with superior price performance compared with other analytics tools.

Given the massive scale of its platform, the company relies on Google Cloud Storage for file loading, Google Compute Engine to run its analytics tools, and Google’s networking tools to ensure high scalability, better security and more rapid analytics.

Ocient’s unique ability to support rapid data access has helped it to achieve some impressive growth over the last year, with revenue increasing by 109% in the last fiscal year. The startup said growing demand for artificial intelligence, real-time analytics and geospatial workloads means that more companies are looking for ways to perform continuous and compute-intensive analysis of large and complex datasets without seeing their costs balloon.

“Organizations are being challenged to deliver energy efficient hyper-growth data analysis without accelerating costs, which has become increasingly challenging as real-time analytics, SQL, AI/ML and geospatial workloads typically require more energy consumption,” said Chief Executive Chris Gladwin. “The close of this latest round of financing is an indication that the need for the solutions we bring to market is growing across industries, and geographies.”

Ocient also points to its ability to help companies achieve environmental sustainability goals, supporting massive data processing and analytics workloads with reduced energy consumption and, consequently, fewer greenhouse gas emissions. It cites Gartner Inc.’s 2023 Top Trends in Data and Analytics report that shows how the energy demands of machine learning workloads could account for 3.5% of the world’s total energy consumption by 2030 if companies don’t embrace a more energy-efficient data infrastructure.

OCA Ventures Founding Managing Partner Jim Dugan said the growth and increased complexity of enterprises’ datasets is forcing them to rethink their data architectures. “Ocient’s unique approach to enabling the analysis of these always-on, compute-intensive datasets while optimizing for performance, costs and energy-efficiency is a win-win for businesses and the environment,” he insisted.

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