Ascend.io, a company that develops data automation products for enterprise customers, has raised over $30 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global with participation from Shasta and existing investor, it announced today. Ascend's new capital will be used to expand the startup's engineering, sales and marketing teams and extend the platform to support them.
The adoption of artificial intelligence and analytic technologies was boosted by the Pandemic. The health crises forced businesses to quickly adapt to the changes. 80% of U.S.-based businesses said that they accelerated their artificial intelligence implementation over the past two years, while 20% said they boosted their usage of business analytic tools.
The benefits have not been evenly distributed. Some data shows that the vast majority of small- and medium-sized businesses haven't adopted any kind of data analysis. One major factor is the challenge in managing, transforming and moving the vast amounts of data required for artificial intelligence. 85% of data leaders believe that flawed data management can lead to poor decision-making and lost revenue, according to a report.
Ascend.io has a platform.
Ascend can make a difference there. He says that the company's platform is designed to give data teams a unified platform to automate the orchestration of their data engineering and analytic workload.
It was clear that every company was rapidly becoming a data company, and that there was a tremendous shortage of talent available to assist companies. The ability to scale the productivity of people who work with data was what it was. There was little to no technology available to support data engineers in the face of overwhelming demand, even though they had access to tremendous low-level technologies. The small teams of data engineers were quickly falling behind the larger teams.
Data engineers were surveyed to identify the common problems their organizations faced. Ascend was launched out of stealth in 2019, after attracting the initial group of angel investors and venture capitalists.
This is a great time for data engineering. The challenge is not how to innovate once but continue innovating, as last year's innovation is this year. Many companies find that early innovation comes at a significant cost to productivity, and the ongoing maintenance of earlier architectures dramatically strains team bandwidth. The need for advanced automation has emerged as a critical need as leaders look to ensure data teams have the capacity to stay ahead of the curve.
Ascend provides a framework for automated data ingestion that supports no-, low-, and high-code connections to databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and more. A data lake is a centralized repository for structured and unstructured data, while a data warehouse is a system for business intelligence activities. With this framework and other tools, a brand could build out a customer data platform to normalize customer data from multiple sources, for example, or create a business intelligence platform like Looker to bring data from online sales into a business intelligence platform.
The image is from Ascend.io.
By the end of the year, the goal is to introduce new features that automate data workloads across clouds, data lakes, data warehouses and more. Ascend plans to add full multi-cloud data mesh automation to include Amazon Web Services Redshift, Amazon Glue and Microsoft Synapse.
There is a preview of the Glue and Redshift serverless integration.
Organizations are collecting, storing, processing and sharing data across multiple systems. Trying to coordinate data movement and processing across these systems often results in systems that threaten data integrity and undermine the confidence of data systems. Companies relied more on data to succeed and keep the business moving during the Pandemic, and increasingly adopted automation as a way of helping their already overloading teams achieve more and boost productivity.
Ascend, which currently has 23 employees, has seen a 600% increase in annual recurring revenue over the past year. Ascend's user count grew despite competition from other companies, as the platform began to automate more than 10 million data processing jobs each month.
Ascend's Series B round is an exciting move for us, according to Issac Roth, managing director at Shasta. Ascend's innovative approach to automation addresses the rapidly growing and presently unmet needs of the market and we are bullish on the data ecosystem as a whole. Their growth numbers and customer satisfaction are inspiring, and we are excited to partner with them.
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