Data-analytics platform Ocient has secured $49.4 million in add-on funding, bringing its sum of total investment capital raised since its founding to $119 million.
The new funding, announced Monday, is a Series B extension that includes new venture investors Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital and Wolf Capital Management.
Founded in 2016, Ocient is a 2021 Chicago Inno Fire winner and reports that its revenue has doubled in its last fiscal year.
The company was launched by Chicago tech guru Chris Gladwin. Its products and services enable organizations to analyze an ever-accelerating amount of data in their respective industries.
Ocient announced its $46 million Series B round in 2021.
Gladwin said he elected to go for additional Series B funding rather than begin a new round given the challenges for startup founders nationally with venture funding declines seen throughout 2023,
"That's what you generally see the last few times that venture has contracted," he told Chicago Inno. "This is my fourth venture-backed company. I managed one through the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, and I don't know what people will call this. Maybe the Silicon Valley Bank crash."
Moving forward, Gladwin said he plans to advance product capabilities and expand to new verticals because the demand just keeps "growing bigger and bigger."
Emerging technologies drive need for energy efficiency
For all the possibilities created by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the growth of those technologies has not come without challenges. Among them is that the energy needed for these emerging technologies is expected to grow to 3.5% of global electricity consumption by 2030, Ocient noted in its statement on the new funding, driving a need for more energy efficient data storage and analysis.
Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing partner of Buoyant Ventures, told Chicago Inno global data centers by 2028 are projected to consume as much energy as the country Brazil.
Amid a push to decarbonize and make data centers more energy efficient, Francetic thinks Ocient could have a fundamental impact.
"We're reaching this very intense time where data centers are consuming a lot of energy and it's not possible to purchase enough renewable energy to power all the data centers that are needed today in North America," Francetic said. "A lot of the big companies are looking at minor improvements like cooling and water usage, but it won't move the needle much, so we were looking for something a little bit more fundamental."
