Chicago data firm Ocient raises $100 million to help AI dig through huge data

Ocient, a Chicago company that makes software for searching very large piles of data, has raised $100 million. Boka Capital and OCA Ventures co-led the round. The money will grow its AI analytics business, where software "agents" ask questions of data in place of people.

What Ocient does

Ocient makes a fast data analytics platform. In plain terms, it lets organizations ask questions of enormous amounts of information. Its OcientAIQ Solutions let both AI agents and human analysts query datasets at petabyte scale, meaning huge volumes of data. An AI agent is software that carries out tasks on its own.

CEO John Morris said software agents, rather than human analysts, increasingly query its systems. That drives more use and creates demand for more complete datasets.

Why checking everything matters

Much of the growth comes from national security groups and telecommunications providers. Many have had to sample data coming off their networks, which means looking at only a slice. "They don't have anything that can handle the ingest rates, nor that can store at an affordable price tens of petabytes of data," Morris said.

In cybersecurity, Ocient supplies the data foundation so security tools and AI agents can study network activity across complete historical records. That could reveal threats sampling would miss. Morris said Ocient is not a cybersecurity tool and does not build the detection software.

The money and the plan

This was a Series C, a later-stage funding round. It brings Ocient's total funding to $260 million. The company expects revenue to more than triple in its current fiscal year, which ends in January, after doubling the year before.

Most of the money will go to hiring sales and customer delivery staff, plus continued engineering. Ocient also wants to expand in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. It competes with Snowflake, Databricks and open-source tools, though Morris said its technology often works alongside them.

Why on-premises is back

Morris said most of Ocient's opportunities now are on-premises, meaning customers run the software on their own hardware. "They're either repatriating for cost reasons or for data sovereignty and data protection issues," he said. Repatriating means moving data back from outside services.

What is not known

• Morris said the funding should be enough to reach breakeven but gave no timetable.
• The article gives no dollar revenue figures, only growth rates.
• The growth claims come from the company itself.