TileDB structures $15m series A

TileDB, a US-based data analytics spinout of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and semiconductor producer Intel, has raised $15m in a series A round backed by the latter’s corporate venturing arm Intel Capital.
The round was led by venture firm Two Bear Capital and also included Uncorrelated Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Big Pi Ventures.
Founded in 2017, TileDB has built a data management platform that coordinates multiple storage formats and servers in order to perform analytics on large and versatile datasets.
Applications for the technology include population genome analytics, a discipline aimed at understanding how evolution affects the genome of a given species, and spatio-temporal satellite imaging, combining precise ground footage with the time at which data was recorded.
The technology was invented by a team under Stavros Papadopoulos, a senior research scientist at Intel Labs, the corporate’s open R&D arm, who holds a visiting appointment at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The series A cash will drive TileDB’s go-to-market and product development strategies. Mike Goguen, managing partner at Two Bear Capital, will join the board of directors.
TileDB secured $4m in a January 2019 round led by Nexus with contributions from both Intel Capital and Big Pi Ventures, after Nexus and Intel Capital had co-led a $1m round for the spinout closed in 2017.
Papadopoulos said: “We invented a database that focuses on universal storage and data management rather than the compute layer, which we have instead made `pluggable’.
“We cleared the path for analytics professionals and data scientists by taking over the messiest parts of data management, such as optimised storage for all data types on numerous backends, data versioning, metadata, access control within or outside organizational boundaries, and logging.”