OVF, Hale Capital, Galois plant seed funding for thatDot streaming data platform

The Connect software takes in and stores billions of events in real time to build robust relationship graphs, spot patterns in streaming data, highlight anomalies in streaming categorical data and prompt subsequent workflows.

Connect is about finding relationships, said Rob Malnati, co-founder and COO in an interview with EdgeIR. “It’s about taking massive amounts of data and reducing that down to the information that matters,” he said.

ThatDot is not an edge software company, per se, but its software has plenty of applicability to edge environments such as industrial IoT, where large amounts of data are being generated and require analysis. Some edge data analytics approaches deal with the data deluge by filtering out unneeded data with edge processing; other approaches seek to apply AI and ML algorithms to perform edge analytics. The Connect software will likely be used in a core data center next to AWS Kinesis or Apache Kafka data sources and perform functions there, but it can be installed anywhere data is being aggregated.

(An illustration of Connect data stream workflows. Source: thatDot)

Malnati said ThatDot’s advantage is in combining any number of data sources together to find insights, whether its sensors or network logs or metrics from sources like Datadog, New Relic, Alert Logic and others.

“Anybody can combine all these things to gain insight without having to build data pipelines,” he said. This ability is important because enterprises are often using microservices to quickly build scalable applications, yet it is difficult to keep rebuilding data pipelines to accommodate changes to the application.

“We can help companies accelerate service development. Instead of building the data pipeline, they can buy something that has scale and schema flexibility built-in,” Malnati said, noting that they have several companies looking at this as a way to build the application backend using a SaaS approach.

Key customer use cases initially include

– Real-time root cause analysis
– Security event correlation
– Video observability

The firm’s software emerged out of research and development that was being done on behalf of federal defense innovator and funder DARPA.

The combination of backers is of interest, too. Getting funding while traditional angel investors were pulling in oars resulted in ThatDot getting funding from several firms. Malnati said there was plenty of interest, given that the company already has a product available, unlike most seed-round companies.

Investors include Oregon Venture Fund, which invests in business plans coming out Oregon and southwest Washington. Not a sovereign wealth fund, its investors are from the private sector. Galois, primarily an R&D lab, works to realize the program aims of business, defense and intelligence agencies. Hale Capital is an equity and debt player that typically assists middle-market companies to rebuild growth momentum.

Article Topics

AI  |  big data  |  DARPA  |  edge analytics  |  IIoT  |  streaming data  |  thatDot