A company co-founded last year by two University of Texas at Austin professors already has achieved a significant milestone.
KatanaGraph Inc. on Feb. 24 announced it had closed a $28.5 million series A funding round. Silicon Valley-headquartered Intel Capital led the round. Dell Technologies Capital, WRVI Capital, Nepenthe Capital and Redline Capital also participated.
Vijay Reddy, Intel Capital investment director, has joined Katana Graph’s board as part of the deal.
The startup uses graph computing to analyze unstructured data. The company also applies artificial intelligence and analytics to gain insights from data.
“We are delighted to be investing in Katana Graph and its elite team,” said Scott Darling, Dell Technologies Capital president, in a statement. “The Katana platform is a breakthrough solution that integrates data ingestion, querying and analytics with unprecedented scale and performance to address the data deluge problem for unstructured graph data. We are also excited to back the company given Dell Technologies’ and Katana Graph’s shared roots in the University of Texas at Austin.”
Dell Technologies Capital is the Palo Alto, California-based venture investing arm of Round Rock-based Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE: DELL). Michael Dell founded Dell in 1984 while he was a student at UT Austin.
Katana Graph CEO Keshav Pingali said Dell emailed him and personally asked “if they could invest because they had heard about Katana from UT Austin sources. And so, of course, we said yes, and we made room for them.”
The company's "platform helps large enterprises make sense of their large unstructured data sets, and we’re seeing this demand across a variety of industries from social networks to biomedical and pharmaceutical research,” said Anthony Lin, Intel Capital managing partner, in a statement. “We’re looking forward to helping Katana Graph accelerate their growth.”
Katana Graph serves customers in the pharmaceutical, financial technology, identity and security sectors, among others. The company in October announced a partnership with Silicon Valley-headquartered Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). Virginia-headquartered defense contractor BAE Systems Inc. is a former customer.
Pingali and Chief Technology Officer Chris Rossbach co-founded the company during spring 2020. Pingali is a UT Austin computer science professor and the W.A."Tax" Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing. Rossbach is a UT Austin computer science assistant professor who previously was a senior affiliated researcher at VMware Research group and a former member of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.
The company has raised $33 million to date, Pingali said. The series A close provides Katana Graph with roughly year and a half of runway. A series B funding round will be around that corner.
Pingali said part of the fresh capital will go toward accelerating product lines and another part would go toward hiring “a lot more people.”
The company currently employs 25 to 30, the CEO said. The majority of those are based in the Texas capital. Others work in New York and San Francisco.
Katana Graph will triple its workforce within the next 12 months, Pingali said. Positions to be filled include those in software engineering, sales and marketing.
“I anticipate that a lot of that hiring will be in Austin, but it will be wherever we can find talent,” he said.
The startup’s headquarters is located at 400 W. 15th St. Katana Graph leased that space on March 15, when the company employed about eight, the CEO said. The operation already has outgrown that space and Pingali said he and his colleagues are looking for more.
John Scoblick, an Austin-based corporate managing director for Savills, is the company’s commercial real estate broker.
Pingali declined to share revenue figures, but said the company is not yet profitable as it continues to grow.
