Molecula, an Austin data virtualization startup, announced Thursday that it closed a $6 million seed round to bring its AI-accelerating software to more big brand clients.
The oversubscribed funding round was backed by The Seraph Group, Lontra Ventures, Velar Capital, Capital Factory, Andrew Busey and Jason Dorsey. The investment adds to the $4.5 million Austin Inno reported on in May, which included backing from Hypergiant Industries co-founder Ben Lamm, as well as Tony Robbins, Tom Meredith and John Porter.
“All of these folks are investors who can help further our cause and help us go to market," Molecula CRO Ganesh Padmanabhan told Austin Inno this week.
Molecula's software reduces the risk of errors in data and helps prepare it for complex analysis by making data from a variety of sources and locations instantly available through a virtualized access layer. They call it "zero-copy data virtualization."
The company was spun out of Austin data startup Umbel in 2017 by co-founder and CEO H.O. Maycotte. It was called Pilosa at the time, and it provided an open source approach to optimizing data for artificial intelligence analysis. In May, the company rebranded as Molecula, expanded its team and started picking up large enterprise customers.
It now has 15 employees and about 1,900 organizations using its open source or enterprise product. The company declined to name clients, except for Austin-based fintech company Q2 Holdings.
“We are using Molecula to analyze fraudulent activity across 100,000,000 monthly login events in real time," Q2 Holdings CTO Adam Blue said in a statement. "With Molecula and our data pipeline, we are able to analyze this volume of data and allow our teams to focus on innovation to create value for our customers."
Maycotte, Molecula's founder and CEO, said big companies need to quickly integrate new data techniques and high-level analysis to draw new insights faster than traditional methods allow.
"Our approach brings a radical new set of innovations that are orders of magnitude faster, more secure and less expensive to operate than the brute force approaches of today," he said in a statement. "More importantly the simple elegance of these new architectures will lay the foundation for a network of data assets that will underpin the human-machine partnership, driving trillions in economic value for enterprises in the coming decade.”
