Chicago-based startup Ocient, a product of tech entrepreneur and Cleversafe founder Chris Gladwin, is partnering with the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy to help support the school’s development of programs for students interested in computer science.
IMSA is a top-rated high school in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, which has produced notable tech entrepreneurs like Steve Chen, Yu Pan and Russell Simmons, co-founders of YouTube, PayPal and Yelp, respectively. On Tuesday, the school and Ocient announced the collaboration, which says that Ocient will help fund educational and professional growth opportunities for students at IMSA over the next 10 years.
Brian Hand, Ocient’s chief operating officer, declined to disclose how much funding Ocient is providing to IMSA or what exactly the programs will look like. But he said the tech company wanted to partner with the school as a way to recruit employees down the line. This is also the first partnership Ocient has established with an institution.
“Based on the intellectual demands of what we’re trying to build, we really need to find top-level people who are really into math and computer science,” Hand said. “And IMSA is clearly the place to look for those types of people within the state of Illinois.”
Ocient, founded in 2016, is building database and analytics software to help companies better understand the massive amounts of data they’re collecting. The startup says it is preparing for a time when businesses will be producing trillions of rows of data and will need Ocient’s software to efficiently analyze it.
Hand said Ocient wanted to get involved with an education-based initiative because that’s how the company found many of its current employees. Ocient has been vigorously recruiting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a college known for its computer science programs. And now, three-fourths of Ocient’s recruits are from U of I.
“It’s a phenomenal educational institution,” Hand said. “The reputation is well-deserved. The students there are truly outstanding.”
He said the new partnership will allow Ocient to follow IMSA grads through college and to graduation when they'll be searching for a full-time job.
“The focus is finding IMSA grads who are at a great university, studying computer science and want to work in Chicago after they graduate,” Hand said.
Ocient, which raised $10 million in March from undisclosed investors, has 42 employees right now, up from eight at the beginning of last year.
