Database and analytics software startup Ocient raises $10 million in Series A funding for R&D and expansion of its engineering team

Chicago-based database and analytics software startup, Ocient, has raised $10 million in Series A funding to support its growing engineering team, continue research & development and activate its new development lab. The investors and the terms of the deals were not disclosed.  Founded by the talent behind the largest software startup exit in Chicago’s history, Ocient is a well-funded company, with an engineering team comprised of brilliant computer scientists hailing from the world’s top universities and organizations.

Ocient, a company building a relational database and analytics software platform for petabyte- to exabyte-scale data sets. Ocient’s platform is designed to hold quadrillions of rows of data, ingress at speeds of billions of rows per second, and filter and compute results at rates of up to trillions of rows per second. Ocient was co-founded by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles. The startup is building software that will transform how organizations analyze immense amounts of data, achieving unmatched price/performance levels.

“Analyzing massive datasets gets harder and more expensive every day, but available databases and analytics software can barely keep up with current demands,” said Gladwin, Ocient’s CEO. “When we look out one, three, five years or more, current technology has no chance of cost effectively meeting the database and analytics needs of large organizations. Ocient’s engineers are building software that will make it materially faster, easier and more cost-effective for organizations to manage these giant datasets and scale as data quantities grow dramatically over the next decade.”

Ocient took over the 15,500 square foot 8th floor of the Boeing Building in late 2017. Also on the 8th floor, the company has a fully configured on-premise development lab for engineering and testing high-performance software. The Ocient development lab can be significantly expanded in terms of both space and power, with up to 14,000 square feet and four megawatts of available capacity.

“Our technology requires both elite engineers and on-site infrastructure that can handle the extreme performance demands of exabyte scale data sets,” said Jablonski, Ocient’s CTO. “With this funding, Ocient will continue to recruit the best and the brightest from the world’s top computer science & engineering programs and leading technology companies, and also make the substantial investment required for a state-of-the-art development environment.”