Kinetica Could Boost NVidia In $70B Big Data Market
Just because you start a company and raise tens of millions of dollars to fuel it’s growth, there’s no guarantee you have what it takes to build a large company.
In fact, some 60% of founders do not survive their Series D round of venture funding.
This comes to mind in considering San Francisco-based database supplier, Kinetica. Founded in 2009, Kinetica raised $50 million in June 2017 — bringing its total funding to $63 million. Six months later, Kinetica’s board replaced the its cofounder and CEO — Amit Vij — with Paul Appleby, an experienced sales executive.
Kinetica — which seems pleased with its handle “the insight engine for the Extreme Data Economy” — says that its technology “combines artificial intelligence and machine learning, data visualization and location-based analytics, and the accelerated computing power of a GPU [Graphical Processing Units made by the likes of Nvidia to run video games] database.”
Simply put, Kinetica joins other companies — such as MapD, about which I wrote in Julyand recently changed its name to OmniSci — that put the GPU at the core of their technology rather than the CPU [central processing unit] that powers traditional databases. Given the demand for rapid graphical display of data analysis, the GPU-based technologies ought to have an audience beyond video gamers and animation lovers.
To its credit, Kinetica has built relationships with companies and technology partners to bring this idea to life. Kinetica seeks customers from industries including healthcare, energy, telecommunications, retail, and financial services. And its technology and marketing partners include NVIDIA, Dell, HP, and IBM.
Kinetica competes with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM which supply traditional databases.
I don’t think Kinetica should worry these rivals since the startup is so small. But since Kinetica and OmniSci — which counts the chipmaker as an investor — are using the NVidia GPU — specifically the Tesla and DGX for AI, data scientists and big data researchers; and GRID for cloud-based visual computing users, according to its latest quarterly report — their success should be helpful for NVidia investors.
(I have no financial interest in the securities mentioned).
The brains behind Kinetica are Vij and his Kinetica co-founder Nima Negahban. As Fortune wrote, “They worked at the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command and the National Security Agency creating a system to track and capture terrorists in real-time. The U.S. Postal Service has used Kinetica since 2014 in a system that optimizes routes and tracks packages.”
Vij lost the top spot at Kinetica to Appleby in December 2017. The company was looking for “sales momentum” and in Appleby — who had most recently served as president, worldwide sales and marketing, at BMC Software (and previously as an executive at Salesforce, C3 IoT, and Siebel Systems) — Kinetica director, Ray Lane, seemed to think he fit the bill.
As Lane said last December,
Appleby has delivered growth. As he said in a September 16 interview, “At the beginning of the year we had 70 to 80 people and now we have 110. In the first half of 2018, we grew bookings 156% and the number of net new customers by 190%. A significant number of our existing customers are expanding their relationship with Kinetica.”
To get Kinetica to the next level, Appleby said the company is organized by function. “We’re an innovation-driven company, and the majority of our employees, two-thirds of the company, are engineering and innovation-focused. Almost half of our employees are based out of our Arlington, Virginia engineering office. Our admin, finance, people, and marketing functions are San Francisco-based, and our sales team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and the United States,” he said.
Appleby believes that everyone who works with a company — including its leadership, employees, and partners — should be “aligned to a common set of strategic goals and objectives.
