Funding for analytics startups continued at a torrid pace in the second quarter; 140 announced investments totaled $1.03 billion, compared to 137 investments totaling $657 million in the second quarter of 2013. Year to date, investment in analytic ventures is up 97% versus the first two quarters of last year. (All data sourced from Crunchbase).
Eleven mezzanine rounds raised a total of $412m, 40% of the total amount invested in the sector. There were two private equity investments:
- Attensity raised $90m on the strength of its natural language processing, text mining and sentiment analysis solution.
- Hadoop distributor MapR raised $80m from Google Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Mayfield Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners. MapR also received a $30m loan from Silicon Valley Bank.
In other notable mezzanine rounds:
- BPM solution vendor Tidemark raised $32m in an E round funded by Tenaya Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Andreeson Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.
- Social media platform Sprinklr landed $40m in D round funding from Intel Capital, Battery Ventures and Iconiq Capital.
- BI vendor SiSense raised $30m in a C round from Opus Capital, Genesis Partners, Battery Ventures and DFJ Growth.
- HR solutions provider Visier raised $25.5m in a C round from Summit Partners, Foundation Capital and Adams Street Partners.
- Predictive marketing platform provider AgilOne received $25m in C round funding from Sequoia Capital, Four Rivers Group, Next World Capital, Tenaya Capital and Mayfield Fund.
Nineteen “B” rounds raised $282m. Top recipients include:
- Credit scoring specialist Kreditech raised $40m from Point Nine Capital, Blumberg Capital and Varde Partners.
- Data platform Krux landed $35m in a round led by SAP Capital.
- Databricks capitalized on interest in Apache Spark by raising $33m from New Enterprise Associates and Andreeson Horowitz.
- Social listening vendor Brandwatch raised $22m from Nauta Capital and Highland Capital Partners.
- Context Relevant, a firm that offers diverse horizontal solutions with embedded analytics, landed $21m in funding from a group led by Formation 8.
Nineteen “A” rounds raised $126m. Notable recipients include:
- Evidence-based medicine provider Orange Health Solutions disclosed an equity investment of $22.5m from unknown investors.
- 6Sense, developer of an eponymous sales and marketing intelligence platform, raised $12m from Battery Ventures, Venrock and Silicon Valley Bank.
- Health analytics platform vendor Aver Informatics landed $8.5 from GE Ventures and Drive Capital.
Forty pre-venture rounds — Seed, Angel, Grants and Crowdsourcing — raised $30m. The largest of these, at $2.65m, went to Farmeron, developer of a cloud-based analytics app for farm business management.
For this analysis, I classify firms as analytics providers if the Crunchbase company_category_list field contains the word “Analytics”. This is a broad definition that includes:
- Analytic data platforms (MapR)
- Analytic tools providers (RapidMiner)
- Analytic service providers (Palantir)
- Business solutions with embedded analytics (AgilOne)
Of course, the quality of this classification depends on the quality of the data in Crunchbase, which is a work in progress.
Thomas Dinsmore's Blog 