Sentenai, a data science technology company based in Downtown Crossing, announced on Tuesday it has raised $2 million in a second seed funding round, bringing the total capital raised to around $3.8 million.
The latest round of Sentenai marked one of the first investments for One Way Ventures, a Boston-based fund founded by Semyon Dukach and Eveline Buchatskiy. Both Dukach and Buchatskiy held executive positions at TechStars Boston around the same time Rohit Gupta, who later become co-founder and CEO of Sentenai, was a director.
Additional new Sentenai investors for this round include TechNexus Venture Collaborative, as well as notable angels Rob May, Jennifer Lum and Julia Austin.
"[In] our initial seed round, we focused mainly on research and development of technology, and in our second seed round we're focused on the commercialization and expansion of our initial business," Brendan Kohler, co-founder and CTO of Sentenai, said in an interview.
Sentenai, which provides a software platform that helps different kind of companies gain insights from sensor data, will use the latest capital raised to go after underserved markets, Kohler explained.
In addition, the company recently moved from Cambridge to a new office (which is the former RapidMiner's space on Washington St.) to accommodate more employees joining the current staff of 11 full-time: new hires will include data scientists, distributed systems engineers and database engineers.
Launched in the fall of 2015, Sentenai raised its first $1.8 million seed round in January 2016, from Flybridge Capital Partners, Founder Collective, Project 11 Ventures and Hyperplane Venture Capital (Kohler co-founded the latter). Kohler explained that the way the market is evolving, the company could raise a Series A round after establishing traction within larger enterprises.
"Sentenai has been around for a couple of years now," Kohler said. "We saw an opportunity to greatly expand our impact on businesses by raising a second seed round."
