Turning customers into investors is one of the specialties of Cambridge-based Tamr. First, General Electric and Thomson Reuters—now, Samsung Ventures.
The machine learning company announced on Wednesday the closing of a $18 million strategic round of funding that includes its customer Samsung Ventures (one of the backers of another MIT-born Cambridge startup, nuTonomy) among the investors.
Tamr focuses on helping big companies access and combine large amounts of data from multiple sources. The latest financing brings its total investment to date to $65 million.
In an interview with BostInno, Tamr CEO Andy Palmer explained that there isn't a leading investor in this round, although Samsung Ventures was the first investor.
"We've been talking to Samsung for more than a couple of years, as a customer of Tamr," Palmer said. "The strategic investment really represents the evolution of our relationship."
Many of Tamr's backers started as customers, including General Electric, Thomson Reuters, MassMutual and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In addition to Toyota, Novartis, Merck and Huawei, the company recently added Littlefuse, a publicly traded electronics manufacturer based in Chicago, as a customer.
Palmer qualified the stage of the latest $18 million round as "B1," or an extension of the strategic round the company closed in May last year with General Electric. The company said it started considering raising additional capital later last year.
"It took a little longer than we would have liked, but the outcome is really fantastic," Palmer said.
In addition to Samsung, the current round includes participation from new investors SBI Investment, INTAGE Open Innovation Fund, Fenox Venture Capital and Alumni Ventures Group, with additional participation from founding investors NEA and Google Ventures, as well as other existing investors.
Samsung is not the only investor based in Asia, as Palmer noted. Both INTAGE Open Innovation Fund and SBI Investment are based in Japan, and Samsung is based in South Korea.
"There [are] a number of projects that we are working with our customers that are global in nature," Palmer said. "Asia Pacific is going to be very, very important to us going forward."
Tamr will use the money to invest in sales and marketing, as well as to expand its engineering team. The goal, Palmer said, is to grow the company 100% year-over-year on the top line; if they manage to do it efficiently, Tamr would probably grow its sales and marketing team by 50% year-over-year (Palmer won't disclose revenue information, neither the number of employees currently working in sales).
Spun out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2013, Tamr is based in Harvard Square (right across the street from another machine learning company, Kensho) with a team of 85 employees.
