DotData raises $23 million to automate data science tasks

DotData, a San Mateo, California-based provider of automation tools that operationalize data science processes, today announced it has raised $23 million in a series A funding round led by JAFCO, with participation from Goldman Sachs. The fresh capital brings its total raised to $43 million, following a $20 million seed round in April 2018. CEO Ryohei Fujimaki said the funds will bolster the company’s ongoing sales, marketing, and product development efforts.

“We are pleased with the confidence our investors show in our vision, team, product, and ability to execute and expand market share,” said Fujimaki, who founded DotData in 2018 with Kusumura Yukitaka, Masato Asahara, and Yusuke Muraoka. “Our company’s rapid growth over the past 18 months signals a significant market demand for our unique data science automation platform. These funds will enable us to accelerate product development and innovation to continue bringing transformational value to our customers.”

DotData, a spinoff of NEC, offers a no-code platform that leverages machine learning to clean, normalize, aggregate, and combine data sets while performing feature engineering. It autonomously transforms hundreds of database tables and billions of rows, expediting laborious work that would otherwise have to be undertaken manually. It furthermore generates AI scoring pipelines in production that integrate with existing workflows, ensuring repeatability. And it develops dotDataPy, a Python library that kicks off end-to-end workloads with only a few lines of code.

DotData hasn’t disclosed the names of any customers, but it claims its products are used by Fortune 500 companies “around the world” and that revenue grew 300% in the past year.

“DotData offers the most powerful and broad machine learning automation solution, as far as we know. We are impressed with their passion to tackle the big challenge of automating the full-cycle data science process from raw data through feature engineering to machine learning in production to meet the globally increasing demand for solutions [and] help enterprises optimize value from their AI and machine learning initiatives,” said JAFCO partner Tomotake Kitazawa. “DotData is well-positioned to lead this growing AutoML market segment with its innovation. We are excited to partner with DotData as they continue to build a leading company in an exciting category.”

DotData competes against startups like Datameer, which is developing an end-to-end platform for data prep and analytics life cycle management, and Dataiku, which offers a cloud-based big data analysis toolset. There’s also rival Unreal, a data operations platform developer addressing everything from data ingestion and migration to processing, not to mention hyperconverged analytics toolkit provider Incorta.

The big data as a service market is anticipated to be worth $51.9 billion by 2025, assuming the current trend holds.