One of Chicago's most successful entrepreneurs just raised the first round of funding for his ambitious new startup.
Ocient, co-founded by Cleversafe founder Chris Gladwin, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $10 million Series A. Ocient is building database and analytics software to help companies better understand the massive amounts of data they're collecting. Ocient is preparing for a future where businesses will be producing trillions of rows of data, and they'll need a tool like Ocient to quickly and efficiently make sense of it all.
“There are some [companies] that have this problem right now. No doubt about it," Gladwin told Chicago Inno last fall. "But there will be an accelerating amount of places that’ll have this problem in the future.”
Gladwin sold Cleversafe, a cloud storage company, to IBM in 2015 for $1.3 billion. It was one of the largest Chicago tech exits in recent years, and gave early investors 40X returns.
So it's natural that investors would want in on Gladwin's latest startup. But who exactly is behind Ocient's Series A? The company isn't saying, at least for now. Ocient also declined to elaborate on the specifics of its technology or if it has paying customers yet. Cleversafe didn’t generate revenue until year six.
The company said it plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and continue research and development. Ocient has around 30 employees right now.
Co-founded by Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles, Ocient launched in 2016 and moved into the Boeing Building downtown in late 2017. It currently takes up over 15,000 square feet on the eighth floor.
