Ocient, Chris Gladwin's data analytics startup, doubled its headcount last year, including adding a new CTO as the company aims to help more businesses make sense of their data.
Ocient said Wednesday that it has hired Ian Drury as its chief technology officer. Drury spent the last decade at Chicago VC firm OCA Ventures, where he served as a general partner.
OCA was one of Ocient's first investors, and it co-led Ocient's most recent $40 million Series B round in 2021.
Prior to investing at OCA, Drury spent his career in various executive tech roles at firms like TransUnion, Falcon Insurance Group and United Auto Insurance.
The new C-suite hire for Ocient comes as the startup doubled its headcount last year, adding 63 new employees, the company said.
Founded in 2016, Ocient has raised $65 million to date from OCA, Greycroft, Hyde Park Angels, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the CIA), among others.
It's led by CEO Chris Gladwin, one of Chicago's most prolific serial entrepreneurs and the founder of Cleversafe, which 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.
At Ocient, Gladwin is tackling the problem many large enterprises have today: making sense of all their data. Targeting companies that produce trillions of rows of data (think large finance and ad-tech firms), Ocient's tech helps businesses analyze their complex datasets, which are only growing in size.
