Ocient, a Chicago data analytics startup led by one of the city's most well-known serial entrepreneurs, just raised a new round of funding from some familiar investors.
Ocient, led by CEO Chris Gladwin, announced Thursday that it raised $15 million in a round led by Chicago-based OCA Ventures. Also backing the startup is In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Both OCA and In-Q-Tel invested in Gladwin's previous startup Cleversafe, which sold to IBM in 2015 for more than $1.3 billion, netting early investors 40X returns.
This is the second round of funding for Ocient, which raised a $10 million Series A in 2018.
Founded in 2016 by Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles, Ocient is building database and analytics software to help companies better understand the massive amounts of data they’re collecting. The startup 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.
Cleversafe famously didn’t generate revenue until year six, but Gladwin said he's already pacing ahead of that with Ocient, which landed its first paid customers last year. Gladwin said Ocient has a "small number of very large customers," but declined to name them specifically. He noted that Ocient's revenue is largely driven from ad-tech, finance and geospatial companies.
Ocient has grown to 50 employees and plans to double that in the next year. The startup has continued to make hires during Covid-19, and Gladwin said Ocient has seen "record revenue" in the past few months despite the pandemic.
Gladwin believes Ocient is in a prime position to help companies analyze the massive amount of data they collect, which only increases exponentially year after year.
"We know the market size potential is tens of billions of dollars," he said. "There’s so much future opportunity."
