Tamr raises $18 million to pair enterprise data with AI

Tamr, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to speed up data analytics workflows, today announced that it has closed an $18 million funding round from SBI Investment, Intage Open Innovation Fund, Samsung Ventures, Fenox Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and others. Proceeds will be used to expand Tamr’s sales and marketing efforts, CEO and cofounder Andy Palmer wrote in an email.

“This new financing underscores the strategic importance of that mission, as well as our ability to deliver for our customers,” Palmer said. “New strategic investors … see the potential for Tamr’s solutions in the Asian markets, and we expect them to be very helpful to as we expand our geographic footprint.”

Tamr, which launched in 2014 at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference in San Francisco, develops machine learning-powered software that unifies enterprise data by generating, in essence, an adjustable table of database contents. Cofounder Mike Stonebraker of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory conceived of the idea in 2013. He and co-inventors then crystallized the concept in a research paper about a “data tamer system” for large-scale data curation.

The software runs on-premises or in the cloud and maintains a list of a company’s data sources, ingesting data from a variety of sources and using algorithms to identify similarities with and relationships between existing datasets. Next, it matches the data with domain experts in the company, who can instruct the software to integrate the information in the best possible way.

“Our mission when we founded the company … was to enable large enterprises to unify key data to realize maximum strategic and operational benefit,” Palmer said. “DataOps — our vision for how enterprises can reinvent the way they manage data to accelerate digital transformation — is fast becoming a reality and driving widespread adoption of Tamr’s best-of-breed data unification solutions.”

The startup’s customers include heavy hitters like Novartis, Thomson Reuters, GE, Toyota, and GSK. They pay about $300,000 for a two-year license.

Tamr has raised more than $50 million from Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, SineWave Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, and others.