Chris Gladwin's startup Ocient just raised a new round of funding as it looks to help businesses analyze some of the largest datasets in the world.
Ocient announced Monday that it raised a $40 million Series B round led by Chicago-based OCA Ventures and well-known New York VC firm Greycroft. A handful of other Chicago investors were also included in the round, such as Valor Equity, PSP Partners, Hyde Park Angels and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. Other backers included Gaingels, VCapital and the MIT and Northwestern University chapters of Alumni Venture Group.
Ocient has now raised $65 million since it was founded in 2016. It raised $15 million last year from OCA and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA.
The startup is the latest venture from Gladwin, a serial entrepreneur in Chicago whose previous company Cleversafe sold to IBM for $1.3 billion. He also founded MusicNow, a pioneering music licensing startup that sold music rights to companies like Microsoft and Best Buy.
With Ocient, Gladwin, along with his co-founders Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles, is developing technology that will help large companies analyze massive amounts of data. It's working with companies that produce trillions of rows of data and need a tool like Ocient to make sense of it all.
"Our focus is complex analysis of the largest datasets in the world," he said.
Ocient is currently working with finance, ad-tech, security and geospatial mapping companies, Gladwin said, declining to name specific customers. The startup spent the last year piloting its technology with customers, and is now launching large-scale deployments with clients, Gladwin said.
Ocient now has 75 employees. The startup has doubled its headcount since the start of Covid, Gladwin said, and he expects Ocient to reach 150 employees by the end of 2021.
Raising the round during Covid was a much different experience, Gladwin said, noting that he only met one investor in person. The pandemic caused Gladwin to rely on personal relationships to close the round, which is why the Series B is made up predominantly of Chicago-based investors.
"I've done as many rounds as anyone in Chicago. This was unlike any other round," he said. "I didn’t go out to Sandhill Road and spend a week traveling up and down, because you couldn’t."
