Introduce Datalogz BI Ops, a new approach to governance for the Business Intelligence consumption layer
Business intelligence (BI) has revolutionized the way organizations interact with their data, making advanced analytics accessible to non-technical users and empowering decision-makers with actionable insights. With tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and Qlik, BI has become the critical interface between enterprise data and business users. However, as BI adoption accelerates, a critical gap has emerged: governance at the consumption layer.
“BI Ops ensures that business intelligence remains a trusted, secure, and efficient driver of decision-making.”
BI sits at the intersection of data and decision-making. It’s where insights are generated, dashboards are built, and reports are delivered. Yet the rapid proliferation of BI tools and reports—coupled with growing data volumes—has introduced new challenges. Organizations are grappling with fragmented standards, duplicate datasets, conflicting reports, and potential security risks.
According to McKinsey, BI and reporting now account for 5-10% of total IT spend. Despite investments in data governance at the warehouse level, many organizations are finding that these efforts do not extend to the consumption layer where BI operates. This gap has created inefficiencies, eroded trust in data, and exposed organizations to security vulnerabilities.
Introducing BI Ops: Governance at the BI Layer
Datalogz is proud to introduce BI Ops, a new approach to governance designed specifically for the consumption layer. By focusing on BI reporting, datasets, user behavior, platform administration, and resource consumption, BI Ops bridges the gap between data governance and BI operations.
“BI is where the majority of employees interact with data directly. Without proper governance, the benefits of democratized data can quickly become liabilities,” said Logan Havern, CEO at Datalogz. “BI Ops ensures that business intelligence remains a trusted, secure, and efficient driver of decision-making.”
The Three Pillars of BI Ops Governance
- Source of Truth: BI Ops ensures data is accessible through reliable, verified sources, reducing redundancy and improving clarity.
- Trust: By promoting consistency and accuracy, BI Ops builds confidence in BI reports and dashboards.
- Security: BI Ops provides robust oversight of data access and sharing, safeguarding sensitive information.
Datalogz Control Tower: Enabling BI Ops
At the core of Datalogz’s BI Ops solution is the Datalogz Control Tower, a platform designed to bring visibility, monitoring, and security to the consumption layer.
Key features include:
- Unified Metadata Extraction: Provides visibility into BI environments across multiple platforms.
- Monitoring and Alerts: Tracks asset creation, engagement, and failures while identifying discrepancies, redundancies, and unverified datasets.
- Security Oversight: Monitors user behavior, data exports, and administrative changes to mitigate risks.
By addressing these areas, the Datalogz Control Tower empowers organizations to optimize BI usage, eliminate inefficiencies, and enhance security across their analytics stack.
The Future of BI Governance: BI Ops
The rise of BI underscores the need for governance that extends beyond traditional data warehouses. BI Ops is that solution, ensuring that the consumption layer operates as a well-governed, efficient, and secure extension of an organization’s data strategy.
To learn more about BI Ops and the Datalogz Control Tower, schedule a demo at https://www.datalogz.io/book
About Datalogz
Datalogz is a fast-growing, culture-focused, venture-backed startup dedicated to building products that re-imagine an organization's Business Intelligence environments. Datalogz is creating the future of BI Ops and is on a mission to end BI and analytics sprawl. The team comprises elite data technology entrepreneurs and analytics leaders and is always looking to bring on talent that aligns with its vision, mission, and values.
Contacts
Tina Bhatia
Datalogz
+1-315-216-2203
Tina@datalogz.io
Argentine fintech Ualá raises $300M in Series E funding at 2.75B valuation
Ualá Eyes Banking Expansion After $2.75 Billion Valuation
Argentine fintech company Ualá has raised $300 million from investors at a valuation of $2.75 billion, the latest funding haul for one of the most valuable startups in Latin America. The VC arm of insurance giant Allianz has led a $300 million Series E funding round for Ualá. Stone Ridge Holdings Group, Tencent, Pershing Square Foundation, Ribbit Capital, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Soros Fund Management, Rodina, SoftBank Latin America Fund, Jefferies, D1 Capital Partners, Claure Group, AlleyCorp and Monashees all joined the round.
The deal represents the largest growth equity round in Latin America in recent years and marks Allianz X’s first investment in the region. Ualá plans to utilise the capital to enhance its services across Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.
“We’re going to use this to scale Argentina, where my goal is to be the largest bank in the country, not just by users but by book,” founder and CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri said in an interview with Bloomberg News posted Monday (Nov. 11).
He added that the company has not ruled out growth in other markets or acquisitions. The funding will also help with “the expansion of business units in both Mexico and in Colombia,” said Barbieri.
Ualá reached a valuation of $2.45 billion in 2021 following a $350 million injection of private funding. The chief executive told Bloomberg the new valuation “shows confidence” in Ualá’s potential, adding, “We’re very proud to be able to show leadership in the region.”
The company will try to reach profitability in all markets before considering an initial public offering in the U.S., he added.
Barbieri said the increased valuation in the latest round “shows confidence” in Ualá’s potential, adding, “We’re very proud to be able to show leadership in the region.” The company will seek to be profitable in all markets before eyeing an initial public offering in the US, he said.
The funding round comes amid a challenging environment for Latin American startups, with investors staying on the sidelines as interest rates in the US remain high relative recent years. The region saw limited VC dealmaking in the third quarter and relatively few recent acquisitions or new public offerings, according to data from PitchBook.
Regional Reach
Ualá, the largest startup in Argentina, has 8 million users. About 6 million of those are located in its home country, a user base that represents more than 17% of Argentina’s adult population. Launched in 2017 with a debit card, the company now offers a series of products including payments, credit, merchant acquiring and investments. Most recently, demand has been “crazy” for dollar-denominated accounts, Barbieri said, with 100,000 account openings in the first five days of the offering, even though only half a million users were given the option.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei attended the announcement at the company’s newly-inaugurated headquarters in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Of Ualá’s 1,500 employees, about 1,000 are located in Argentina.
The company is looking into Milei’s investment incentive plan, known as RIGI, and Barbieri said he expects the company will qualify for the incentives, but declined to give details.
Barbieri also highlighted the potential of Mexico’s market, where the company operates with a banking license since it received regulator approval in 2023, and where it expects to eventually do more business than it does in Argentina. Barbieri said that Ualá would continue to provide a high yield on savings accounts, a tool that’s become a popular way for fintechs to lure savers in Mexico.
“What has been difficult is to underwrite credit in Mexico to people that don’t have a credit history,” he said. “In our case, we’re debit first and we use that data, plus cellphone data, bill-payment data, remittance data and merchant acquiring data to build our own score and underwrite credit.”
The company will also look to expand its offerings in Colombia, where it has about 700,000 users, but is still adding services. “The rate of growth there has been lower because the product suite is not yet complete,” Barbieri said.
The partnership with Allianz also will open space for Ualá to unlock opportunities in insurtech, according to a press release.
“Our investment in Ualá offers both financial and strategic partnership opportunities, which can enable us jointly to penetrate new customer segments, capitalize on growth opportunities, and enhance customer experience,” Allianz X Chief Executive Officer Nazim Cetin said.
(Corrects second paragraph to reflect investment from Pershing Square Foundation, not Pershing Square Holdings.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
Lambda Announces Strategic Partnership with SK Telecom to Expand Cloud Services in South Korea
GPU cloud company expands international presence, furthering mission to build the world’s largest on-demand GPU cloud for AI
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Lambda Launches First Self-Serve, On-Demand NVIDIA HGX H100 and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand Clusters for AI Model Training
New Lambda 1-Click Clusters provide AI engineers and researchers immediate, easy access to NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs on multiple nodes for large-scale training, without requiring long-term contracts
Lambda, the AI developer cloud, today announced a partnership with South Korea's largest mobile telecommunications company, SK Telecom (SKT). Amid increasing demand for AI infrastructure in South Korea, the partnership with SK Telecom represents a key step in Lambda’s vision to bring its AI Cloud to engineers across the world.
“Given the rapid pace of AI innovation happening in South Korea, we’re excited to partner with SKT in their mission to transform their company and country into a global AI powerhouse.”
“SKT shares in our vision to make GPU compute as ubiquitous as electricity,” said Lambda CEO and co-founder, Stephen Balaban. “Given the rapid pace of AI innovation happening in South Korea, we’re excited to partner with SKT in their mission to transform their company and country into a global AI powerhouse.”
As part of the agreement, Lambda and SK Telecom will deploy Lambda’s AI Cloud platform into SK Broadband’s Gasan data center later this year, enabling SK Telecom to introduce a South Korea based GPU cloud service. This deployment will enable SK Telecom to bring local AI cloud services to enterprises, startups, and research labs in South Korea.
“Through our strategic partnership with Lambda, we are able to bolster SK Telecom’s leadership in AI services and capabilities while unlocking new business opportunities,” said Kim Kyeong-deog, Vice President and Head of Enterprise Business Division at SK Telecom.
About Lambda
Lambda was founded in 2012 by AI engineers with published research at the top machine learning conferences in the world. Our GPU cloud and on-prem hardware enables AI engineers to easily, securely and affordably build, test and deploy AI products at scale. Lambda’s mission is to accelerate human progress with ubiquitous and affordable access to computation. One person, one GPU.
Contacts
Brittany Catucci
pr@lambdal.com
Octane lending expands entering the Marine Market with its seamless, digital buying experience
Octane® (Octane Lending), the fintech revolutionizing the buying experience for major recreational purchases, announced today that it has entered the marine market.
Effective immediately, marine, recreational, and powersports dealers selling pontoons and motorboats can offer competitive rates and flexible terms to a wide range of prime and non-prime customers through Octane’s in-house lender, Roadrunner Financial, Inc.®. Octane’s innovative digital experience allows dealers to move quickly and seamlessly through the financing process, from initial customer inquiry through deal close, saving time for dealers and consumers alike.
“We’re thrilled to bring our innovative, end-to-end financing experience to the marine market,” said Mark Davidson, Chief Growth Officer. “We look forward to supporting dealers and OEMs in this growing market while offering full-spectrum financing that fuels our customers’ lifestyles.”
This expansion follows several exciting milestones for the company; Octane recently announced its Series E funding round, closed a $500 Million Forward-Flow Deal with AB CarVal, and surpassed $5 billion in aggregate originations.
Dealerships interested in Octane’s seamless, digital financing experience can learn more at https://octane.co/o/dealer/signup/.
About Octane:
Octane® is revolutionizing recreational purchases by delivering a seamless, end-to-end digital buying experience. We connect people with their passions by combining cutting-edge technology and innovative risk strategies to make lifestyle purchases–like powersports vehicles, RVs, boats and personal watercraft, and outdoor power equipment–fast, easy, and accessible.
Octane adds value throughout the customer journey: inspiring enthusiasts with the Octane Media™ editorial brands, including Cycle World® and UTV Driver®, instantly prequalifying consumers for financing online, routing customers to dealerships for an easy closing, and supporting customers throughout their loan with superior loan servicing.
Founded in 2014, we have more than 30 OEM and 4,000 dealer partners, and a team of over 500 in remote and hybrid roles. Visit www.octane.co.
Octane® and Roadrunner Financial® are registered service marks of Octane Lending, Inc.
Media Relations: Shannon O'Hara
Press@octane.co
Investor Relations:
IR@octane.co
Lightmatter raises $400M at $4.4B valuation as the photonics leader for next-gen AI data centers
Amid unprecedented demand for extreme-scale data centers, Lightmatter prepares for next phase of growth
With Lightmatter’s new $400M Series D funding round, backed by T. Rowe Price, GV (Google Ventures), Fidelity Investments, and others, they are excited to expedite the roll-out of their photonic engine Passage™ within partner data centers by the end of next year.
“The interconnect layer or layers are really what turn racks of CPUs and GPUs into effectively one giant machine — so it follows that the faster the interconnect, the faster the data center. And it is looking like Lightmatter builds the fastest interconnect layer by a long shot, by using the photonic chips it’s been developing since 2018. ‘Photonics is coming way faster than people thought — people have been struggling to get it working for years, but we’re there,’” said our co-founder and CEO, Nicholas Harris, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Lightmatter’s $400M round has AI hyperscalers hyped for photonic data centers – Techcrunch
READ MORE:
Photonic startup Lightmatter raises $400 million amid AI data center boom, eyes IPO next - Reuters
Photonic Startup Lightmatter Raises $400M Amid Data Center Frenzy; Hits $4.4B Valuation - Crunchbase
Lightmatter, the leader in photonic supercomputing, announced today it has raised a $400 million Series D, valuing the company at $4.4 billion and bringing the total capital raised to date to $850 million. The round was led by new investors advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. with participation from existing investors, including Fidelity Management & Research Company and GV (Google Ventures). With this financing, Lightmatter will ready Passage™ for mass deployment in partner data centers, enabling the scaling required for sustained AI innovation.
“The demand for AI supercomputers that will power the next wave of frontier AI models is strong and growing. We’re pleased to back Lightmatter on their mission to help power AI infrastructure.”
“We’re not just advancing AI infrastructure—we’re reinventing it,” said Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nick Harris. “With Passage, the world’s fastest photonic engine, we’re setting a new standard for performance and breaking through the barriers that limit AI computing. This funding accelerates our ability to scale, delivering the supercomputers of tomorrow today.”
The Next Frontier in Computing Infrastructure
As frontier AI models expand and training clusters surpass 100,000 XPUs, traditional electronic interconnects are becoming a critical bottleneck. These interconnects can’t keep pace with the growing need for high-bandwidth, low-latency data movement, which is crucial for scaling AI workloads. Lightmatter’s Passage technology addresses this challenge by leveraging 3D-stacked photonics chips to move data. This breakthrough dramatically increases AI cluster bandwidth and performance, while reducing power consumption. Passage, the first photonic engine to deliver IO in 3D, frees XPU shoreline to support more memory, addressing another critical bottleneck for scaling AI performance. By transforming data movement across AI clusters, Lightmatter enables systems to scale efficiently, unlocking new levels of performance and preparing computing infrastructure for the demands of next-generation AI models.
“Lightmatter has the technology, leadership, and team to bring the industry the future of computing through photonics,” said Tony Wang, portfolio manager of the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund. “The demand for AI supercomputers that will power the next wave of frontier AI models is strong and growing. We’re pleased to back Lightmatter on their mission to help power AI infrastructure.”
“AI is evolving faster than anyone could have predicted, pushing the limits of data center technology,” said Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV. “Photonics isn’t just a breakthrough; it’s the future of million-xPU data centers for AI. We’ve proudly supported Lightmatter since the beginning, and after six years, our belief in their vision has only grown stronger. Lightmatter is the definitive leader in data center photonics, and we’re excited to stand behind them as they unlock the next era of AI innovation and scale.”
Lightmatter Accelerates Expansive Growth in Line with AI Market Needs
Lightmatter’s Series D fundraise comes on the heels of the appointment of Simona Jankowski as Lightmatter’s Chief Financial Officer, the appointment of Richard Beyer and Robin Washington to its Board of Directors, and incredible customer traction. Since the company’s last funding announcement in December 2023, Lightmatter expanded its footprint with an office in Toronto and continues to grow its team.
About Lightmatter
Lightmatter is leading the revolution in AI data center infrastructure and enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company invented the world's first 3D-stacked photonics engine, Passage, capable of connecting thousands to millions of processors at the speed of light in extreme-scale data centers for the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.
Contacts
Media Contact:
John O’Brien
lightmatter@sbscomms.com
Lightmatter appoints two new members of the Board of Directors Robin Washington and Richard Beyer
Beyer and Washington bring board experience to Lightmatter from Alphabet, Salesforce, and Micron
On the heels of announcing their new CFO from Nvidia. Lightmatter, the leader in photonic supercomputing, today announced it has appointed Richard Beyer and Robin Washington to its board of directors. Beyer and Washington join existing board members in supporting the company’s mission to power the next generation of computing systems to further enable AI innovation.
“While I’ve spent a large part of my career working in the semiconductor industry, the current demand for innovative compute and chip communication solutions is unprecedented”
Beyer brings over three decades of executive leadership experience across the semiconductor and telecommunications industries, and currently sits on the board of directors for Micron Technology, Inc. Previously, Beyer served as Chief Executive Officer at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. and Intersil Corporation. He has also held prior board positions at Dialog Semiconductor, Microsemi Corporation and Analog Devices, Inc.
“While I’ve spent a large part of my career working in the semiconductor industry, the current demand for innovative compute and chip communication solutions is unprecedented,” said Beyer. “I'm eager to support Lightmatter’s vision in my new position and help the team meet the needs of the industry, accelerating what’s possible in AI innovation.”
Washington is a board member of Alphabet, Honeywell International and Salesforce. She currently serves as Chair of the leadership development, inclusion and compensation committee for Alphabet and lead independent director for Salesforce. Washington has over three decades of finance and operations experience in the technology and life sciences industries. Previously, Washington was Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Gilead Sciences, Inc. Prior to Gilead, she was the Chief Financial Officer of Hyperion Solutions, which was acquired by Oracle Corporation.
“It’s clear that the future for Lightmatter is bright – the company is uniquely positioned to fuel AI innovation across industries,” said Washington. “I am thrilled to join the board at such an exciting time in the company’s trajectory, and look forward to working with this incredibly talented team.”
“The Lightmatter team is honored to have Robin and Rich join our board as the company enters a massive growth phase enabling world-leading AI supercomputers,” said Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nick Harris. “Rich and Robin are aligned with our vision to drive the AI industry forward with our groundbreaking photonic technologies. Their deep operating expertise will be instrumental in guiding our mission.”
About Lightmatter
Lightmatter is leading the revolution of computing, reducing impact on our planet, and enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. With the company’s photonics-enabled technologies, Lightmatter has reinvented how chips communicate and calculate. Its photonic interconnect and compute products simultaneously reduce the power consumption and increase the performance of silicon running the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.
Contacts
John O’Brien
press@lightmatter.co
AI inference chip startup Groq closes $640M at $2.8B valuation to meet next-gen LPUs demand
Groq, a leader in fast AI inference, has secured a $640M Series D round at a valuation of $2.8B. The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners with participation from both existing and new investors including Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors including Cisco Investments, Global Brain's KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The unique, vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform has generated skyrocketing demand from developers seeking exceptional speed.
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The AI Chip Boom Saved This Tiny Startup. Now Worth $2.8 Billion, It's Taking On Nvidia - Forbes
AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia - Techcrunch
Groq secures $640M to supercharge AI inference with next-gen LPUs - VentureBeat
"The market for AI compute is meaningful and Groq's vertically integrated solution is well positioned to meet this opportunity. We look forward to supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further," said Samir Menon, Managing Director, BlackRock Private Equity Partners.
Groq, a leader in fast AI inference, has secured a $640M Series D round at a valuation of $2.8B.
"Samsung Catalyst Fund is excited to support Groq," said Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center and EVP of Samsung Electronics. "We are highly impressed by Groq's disruptive compute architecture and their software-first approach. Groq's record-breaking speed and near-instant Generative AI inference performance leads the market."
"You can't power AI without inference compute," said Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq. "We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it's time to deploy these models so the world can use them. Having secured twice the funding sought, we now plan to significantly expand our talent density. We're the team enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models and - we're hiring."
Today, Groq also announced that Stuart Pann, formerly a senior executive from HP and Intel, joined its leadership team as Chief Operating Officer.
"I am delighted to be at Groq at this pivotal moment. We have the technology, the talent, and the market position to rapidly scale our capacity and deliver inference deployment economics for developers as well as for Groq," said Stuart Pann, Chief Operating Officer at Groq.
Groq also gains the world-class expertise of its newest technical advisor, Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Developers Flock to Groq
Groq has quickly grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud™, creating AI applications on openly-available models such as Llama 3.1 from Meta, Whisper Large V3 from OpenAI, Gemma from Google, and Mixtral from Mistral. Groq will use the funding to scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to GroqCloud.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Meta recently shared in his letter entitled, Open Source AI Is the Path Forward,"Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models."
Scaling Capacity
As Gen AI applications move from training to deployment, developers and enterprises require an inference strategy that meets the user and market need for speed. The tsunami of developers flocking to Groq are creating a wide range of new and creative AI applications and models, fueled by Groq instant speed.
To meet its developer and enterprise demand, Groq will deploy over 108,000 LPUs manufactured by GlobalFoundries by the end of Q1 2025, the largest AI inference compute deployment of any non-hyperscaler.
Mohsen Moazami, President of International at Groq, former leader of Emerging Markets at Cisco, is leading commercial efforts with enterprises and partners including Aramco Digital and Earth Wind & Power to build out AI compute centers globally. This will ensure developers have access to Groq technology regardless of their location.
"Aramco Digital is partnering with Groq to build one of the largest AI Inference-as-a-Service compute infrastructure in the MENA region," said Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer, Aramco Digital. "Our close collaboration with Groq is transformational for both domestic and global AI demand."
Accelerating Innovation
Groq LPU™ AI inference technology is architected from the ground up with a software-first design to meet the unique characteristics and needs of AI. This approach has given Groq an advantage to bring new models to developers quickly, at instant speed. The investment will enable Groq to accelerate the next two generations of LPU.
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as exclusive Placement Agent to Groq on the transaction.
About Groq
Groq builds fast AI inference technology. Groq® LPU™ AI inference technology is a hardware and software platform that delivers exceptional AI compute speed, quality, and energy efficiency. Groq, headquartered in Silicon Valley, provides cloud and on-prem solutions at scale for AI applications. The LPU and related systems are designed and manufactured in North America.
Future Groqsters can find open roles here. Try Groq instant speed at www.groq.com.
Media Contact
Megan Hartwick
pr-media@groq.com
Monarch Tractor closes record $133M Series C round for agriculture AI robotics
With this latest raise, the company behind the world's first fully electric, driver-optional, smart tractor cements its position as a leader in the space
Monarch Tractor, creator of the MK-V, the world's first fully electric, driver-optional smart tractor and Wingspan Ag Intelligence (WingspanAI) farm management platform, has today announced a history-making $133 million Series C, making it the largest funding raising round in agricultural robotics history.
Monarch has quickly become a powerhouse within the agricultural space as an off-road electric vehicles (EV) and autonomous vehicles (AV) category leader. To date, the company has raised over $220 million to enable clean, efficient, and economically viable solutions as well as expanded into various agricultural markets such as vineyards, dairy, berries, orchards, and land management across 12 states and three countries. Furthermore, in just the last two years alone they have been recognized as an influential force in farming at national and international levels via accolades, including Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups, CNBC Disruptor 50, TIME Best Inventions, and Fast Company World's Most Innovative Companies.
The Series C funds will support the further development of Monarch's cutting-edge AI product offering, expansion of their operational footprint domestically and globally, while enabling the company's path to profitability.
Funding was co-led by global impact investor Astanor and HH-CTBC Partnership, L.P., with additional support from prominent investors, including At One Ventures, PMV and The Welvaartsfonds.
Monarch's mission with farmer success at the center
Founded on the belief that food security only exists with planet sustainability and farmer profitability, Monarch has been at the forefront of the critical transition to renewably powered and more profitable farming ecosystems, which ultimately empowers farmers worldwide.
In the United States, farm profitability has steadily declined over the past decade, with the sharpest decline in industry history occurring in 2023. Given the nascent nature of technology in agriculture, the sector is ripe with untapped growth potential across automation, digital technologies and AI efficiencies, with Monarch at the forefront of this disruption and technological advancement.
"Driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and electrification, agriculture has arrived as the next frontier for the energy transition and sustainability movement," said Praveen Penmetsa, CEO and co-founder of Monarch Tractor. "Agriculture is our planet's most important and overlooked sector, and those in the industry have faced significant challenges, including farm profitability, labor shortages, worker safety, government headwinds, data availability, and scrutiny for sustainability demands. Monarch's application of AI and introduction of a smart, electric platform will deliver robust social, economic, and environmental returns to farmers."
AI continues to revolutionize farming machinery
Tractors have been the center of all farm operations for several decades. Yet, they've been underutilized as a hub for robotics innovation and farmer payback.
In December 2022, Monarch released the world's first fully electric, driver-optional, smart tractor, the MK-V, to combat profit challenges, address sustainability demands, and revive agriculture innovation. Since then, the deployment of more than 400 MK-V's have helped; resulting in more than 850 tonnes of harmful CO2 emissions offset across 42,000 hours of tractor operations.
Monarch's WingspanAI app is equipping farmers with unprecedented access to on-farm data, integrating a farm management system, vehicle position tracking, crop image collection, and automated operations planning into one platform. The continual development of product solutions, including the introduction of new AI capabilities, will be the driving force in closing the industry's profit gap.
This funding round will support the expansion of Monarch's digital solutions and AI applications, including the development of Autodrive, Monarch's autonomous operations feature, for new global markets and crop sectors.
For more information on Monarch Tractor, visit: www.monarchtractor.com/
About Monarch Tractor
Monarch Tractor's MK-V is the world's first fully electric, driver-optional, smart tractor that combines electrification, automation, machine learning, and data analysis to enhance farmer's existing operations, cut overhead costs, reduce emissions and increase labor productivity and safety. Monarch Tractor is committed to elevating farming practices to enable clean, efficient, and economically viable solutions for today's farmers and the generations of farmers to come. Operating in more than five continents, Monarch Tractor serves vineyards, orchards, blueberries, dairy, and land management sectors. With cutting-edge technology and a global presence, Monarch is delivering meaningful change for the future of farming. For more information, visit www.monarchtractor.com.
Monarch Tractor Media Contact:
Sling & Stone l monarchtractor@slingstone.com
Nvidia’s Simona Jankowski joins AI Chip Startup Lightmatter as CFO
Seasoned NVIDIA and Goldman Sachs financial executive will serve as CFO of the photonic chip leader revolutionizing AI and HPC data centers
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Nvidia’s Jankowski Takes CFO Job at Chip Startup Lightmatter - Bloomberg
Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nicholas Harris and newly-appointed CFO Simona Jankowski, CFA sat down last week with Ian King and Nick Turner at Bloomberg to discuss Lightmatter’s growth trajectory, the chip landscape, and what we see for the future.
“Lightmatter believes that the use of artificial intelligence software is sparking a wholesale change in the computing industry. The massive size of new processors needed to develop AI software — along with the amount of data and energy required — mean greater efficiency is a necessity” – Ian King, Reporter, Bloomberg.
Lightmatter, the leader in photonic supercomputing, today announced the appointment of Simona Jankowski as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Bringing 20+ years of experience from NVIDIA and Goldman Sachs, Jankowski will drive Lightmatter’s financial functions and expansion, and sit on the executive team leading the company’s mission to transform the future of computing.
“Simona’s track record leading financial strategy and investor relations teams, deep expertise in the artificial intelligence industry, and passion for science and engineering will allow us to scale our operations and culture and prepare for Lightmatter’s next phase of growth,” said Nick Harris, co-founder and CEO of Lightmatter. "We are proud to bring on an accomplished leader at the helm of our finance organization as we build the technology powering the next generation of AI innovation.”
Jankowski joins Lightmatter from NVIDIA, where she was vice president of investor relations and strategic finance during a period of unprecedented growth for the company. Previously, she was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where she led equity research for the hardware and communications technology sectors and managed the Global Investment Research office in San Francisco.
"Generative AI is driving unprecedented demand for a new class of extreme-scale data centers. Lightmatter has made foundational breakthroughs in photonics that enable data centers to increase in scale and performance by orders of magnitude, and with greater energy efficiency. With a generational performance lead, Lightmatter is poised to drive the data center photonics revolution,” said Jankowski. “I am thrilled to join this brilliant team of inventors, technologists, and accomplished industry executives to help scale the company for significant growth in the years ahead."
Jankowski’s leadership position follows Lightmatter’s $310M fundraise in 2023, which valued the company at $1.2B, and comes at a time of significant growth for the company. For more information about open roles, visit https://lightmatter.co/people/join-us/.
About Lightmatter
Lightmatter is leading the revolution of computing, reducing impact on our planet, and enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. With the company’s photonics-enabled technologies, Lightmatter has reinvented how chips communicate and calculate. Its photonic interconnect and compute products simultaneously reduce the power consumption and increase the performance of silicon running the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.
Contacts
Media:
John O’Brien
lightmatter@sbscomms.com
AlphaSense closes $650M at $4B valuation and acquires Tegus for $930M
The $930m acquisition will provide customers with a comprehensive combined public and private content offering, further cementing AlphaSense's leadership in market intelligence
READ MORE:
Market Data Firm AlphaSense Valued at $4 Billion in Fundraise - Bloomberg
AI research firm AlphaSense confirms its buy of rival Tegus—only months after filing patent lawsuit - Fortune
AlphaSense, the leading market intelligence and search platform, today announced an agreement to acquire Tegus, a leading provider of expert research, unique private company content, and financial data and workflow tools. This transaction will bring Tegus' breadth of private company data to AlphaSense's platform, further delivering on the companies' shared mission to empower business and financial professionals to make smarter decisions through AI-driven market intelligence. As part of this deal, AlphaSense has raised $650 million in funding, co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners, and joined by new investors, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Blue Owl, Alkeon Capital, as well as existing investors Alphabet's CapitalG and Goldman Sachs Alternatives. This raise brings AlphaSense's valuation to $4 billion.
Today, Tegus has an extensive and fast-growing library of high-quality expert research, which includes coverage of 35,000+ public and private companies across TMT, consumer goods, energy and life sciences sectors. Additionally, Tegus' financial data offering, which includes financials, KPIs, and fully drivable models on more than 4,000 public companies, as well as its BamSEC self-serve solution to search and access securities filings, adds new and unique offerings to AlphaSense's extensive product suite and datasets. Users will benefit from the addition of this content with AlphaSense's market-leading AI and search capabilities, enabling its combined user base to continue easily extracting proprietary insights.
Michael Elnick, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Tegus, said, "This is a significant moment for Tegus. For nearly a decade we've worked to transform how companies and investors conduct research. By joining forces with AlphaSense, we're going to empower clients in new and more powerful ways. AlphaSense and Tegus are like-minded companies, with a shared vision, and I couldn't be more excited to continue pursuing our mission of modernizing research for businesses, together."
For over a decade, AlphaSense has been transforming the research process with the latest innovations in AI technology, while also building its vast collection of top-tier, trustworthy business content. Together, AlphaSense and Tegus will accelerate growth, innovation, and content expansion, bringing their complementary product and content capabilities together to enable users to unearth even more comprehensive insights from thousands of content sets.
This agreement follows a series of recent company milestones for AlphaSense, including being named to the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, exceeding $200 million in ARR and doubling revenue in less than two years, the opening of a new Singapore hub to fuel expansion in the APAC region, a $100 million Series D investment led by Alphabet's CapitalG, and the close of a $150 million Series E funding round led by BOND.
The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2024. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC is acting as AlphaSense's financial advisor, and DLA Piper LLP and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP are acting as AlphaSense's legal advisors. Evercore is acting as Tegus' lead financial advisor and Latham Watkins is acting as Tegus' legal advisor. Morgan Stanley also acted as financial advisor to Tegus.
About AlphaSense
The world's most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients' own research content. Our platform is trusted by over 4,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500.
Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with over 1,300 people across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.alpha-sense.com.
About Tegus
Tegus is an end-to-end research platform that seamlessly combines expert insights, company filings and comprehensive KPIs and financial data, empowering investors to find critical insights quickly, easily create comparables and update models, and develop powerful perspectives to inform their investment decisions. Tegus' proprietary content set now includes more than 100,000 expert call transcripts, financial coverage of more than 4,000 public companies and industry comps and analysis on more than 50 sectors. Tegus acquired BamSEC and then Canalyst, bringing two beloved investment research tools into the Tegus platform to combine powerful quantitative and qualitative data together in a single suite.
Founded in 2016, Tegus is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and employs more than 550 team members across the globe, including in its offices in Vancouver, B.C. and Waterford, Ireland. For more information, please visit www.tegus.com.
Media Contact
media@alpha-sense.com
"This transaction marks a pivotal moment for AlphaSense in our mission to help businesses and investors make better decisions with confidence and speed," said Jack Kokko, CEO and Founder at AlphaSense. "I am thrilled to join forces with the Tegus team as a significant leap forward in furthering our mission, adding top-quality content on public and private companies, and enhancing our ability to deliver even more comprehensive insights to our customers around the world."