It was just last May that Tamr launched out of stealth mode with its tool for helping companies connect and leverage their vast reserves of diverse internal and external data for the challenges of business analytics and better decision making. And now, the company—which was founded by database pioneer and MIT professor Michael Stonebraker and Koa Labs founder Andy Palmer— has closed a $25.2 million Series B round from Hewlett Packard Ventures, Thomson Reuters, MassMutual Ventures, SineWave Ventures and Work-Bench Ventures. Existing Tamr investors NEA and Google Ventures also took part in the round. This new financing brings the total Tamr has raised to date to $42.4 million. The Cambridge-based company plans to use the funds to grow sales as well as product engineering for its data unification technology.
Tamr was founded in 2013 by Palmer, Stonebraker—the 2014 ACM Turing Award winner—and Ihab Ilyas, with George Beskales, Daniel Bruckner and Alex Pagan. Previously, Palmer and Stonebraker started the analytic database management software company Vertica, which they sold to HP in 2010.
Lak Ananth, Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Ventures, has noted that Vertica is now a key component of HP’s Big Data platform.
“As a strategic partner, we’ll help Tamr build enterprise-grade products and a global go-to-market strategy,” he added in a news release.
Combining machine-learning algorithms with collective human insight, Tamr aims to help organizations to tap into and extract more value from both structured and semi-structured data. That data can be plugged into visualizations and maps, while Tamr also helps with leveraging experts in specific fields to make the results digestible—more quickly. Use cases for Tamr include customer data integration and clinical trials management.
“The ability to use 100 percent of available data opens up many opportunities for additional product innovation and enhancements to meet the demands of our policyowners and customers,” MassMutual CTO Allan Campbell stated in the news release.
As of last spring, Tamr had 25 employees. Now, the company—which is currently working out of Koa Labs’ Harvard Square space—has a team of roughly 50.
Said Stonebraker in the press statement: “Tamr’s technology and approach to scalable data unification will be the next big thing in data and analytics — similar to how column-store databases were the next big thing in 2004.”
Image courtesy of Tamr.
