NEC Corporation spinoff dotData secures $23M Series A from JAFCO and Goldman Sachs to deliver full-cycle data science automation to the enterprise

dotData, an enterprise startup a provider of an end-to-end data science automation platform, has raised $23 million in Series A funding to further accelerate the company’s rapid growth by expanding sales and marketing efforts, and enhancing product development innovation of its full-cycle data science automation platform.

Founded in 2018, dotData is a spin off of NEC Corporation, and is led by Dr. Ryohei Fujimaki, a data scientist, and the youngest research fellow ever appointed in the 119-year history of NEC. the  Cupertino, California-based DotData delivers an end-to-end data science automation for the enterprise. dotData’s data science automation platform speeds time to value by accelerating, democratizing, and operationalizing the entire data science process through automation. The Series A financing round was led by JAFCO, with participation by Goldman Sachs, who both join existing dotData Seed round investors NEC Corporation. Founders include: Kusumura Yukitaka, Masato Asahara, Ryohei Fujimaki, and Yusuke Muraoka

The Series A funding comes just 18 months after dotData’s launch and Series Seed round, and builds on an exceptional year for dotData which saw a more than 300 percent increase in revenue growth, multiple product launches and significant recognition as a leader in the rapidly-growing AutoML market, including in The Forrester New WaveTM: Automation-Focused Machine Learning (AutoML) Solutions, Q2 2019.

“dotData offers the most powerful and broad machine learning automation solution as far as we know. We are impressed with their passion to tackle the big challenge of automating the full-cycle data science process from raw data through feature engineering to machine learning in production, to meet the globally-increasing demand for solutions to help enterprises optimize value from their AI and machine learning initiatives,” said Tomotake Kitazawa, Partner of JAFCO. “dotData is well-positioned to lead this growing AutoML market segment with its innovation. We are excited to partner with dotData as they continue to build a leading company in an exciting category.”

“We are pleased with the confidence our investors show in our vision, team, product and ability to execute and expand market share,” said Ryohei Fujimaki, Ph.D., CEO, and founder of dotData. “Our company’s rapid growth over the past 18 months signals a significant market demand for our unique data science automation platform. These funds will enable us to accelerate product development and innovation to continue bringing transformational value to our customers.”

“We are thrilled about dotData’s significant growth since it spun out from NEC, and delighted that it is accelerating its evolution with Series A funds from JAFCO and Goldman Sachs. dotData has proved with our clients that its platform accelerates enterprise data science 10x faster and delivers key business insights via its proprietary AI-powered feature engineering technology,” said Osamu Fujikawa, Senior Vice President of NEC Corporation. “NEC and dotData have already provided solutions to more than 30 companies in Japan and will continue to promote growth and accelerate digital transformation for customers with the support of JAFCO and Goldman Sachs. We are excited about our strengthening partnership with dotData and will continue to support its business expansion and vision to empower all enterprises through its data science technology.”

dotData is one of the only platforms that combines AI-powered feature engineering and AutoML to automate the full life-cycle of the data science process, from source data through feature engineering to implementation of machine learning in production. dotData’s AI-powered feature engineering automatically applies data transformation, cleansing, normalization, aggregation, and combination and transforms hundreds of tables with complex relationships and billions of rows into a single feature table, automating the most manual data science projects.

dotData democratizes data science by enabling existing resources to perform data science tasks, making enterprise data science scalable and sustainable. dotData also operationalizes data science by producing both feature and ML scoring pipelines in production, which IT teams can then immediately integrate with business workflow. This further automates the time-consuming and arduous process of maintaining the deployed pipeline to ensure repeatability as data changes over time. With the dotData GUI, the data science task becomes a five-minute operation, even without significant data science experience nor SQL/Python/R coding.