I’m excited to announce Ascent’s newest portfolio company, Sidecar, the leader in programmatic, product-level advertising. We at Ascent have been active investors in the ad tech space with companies like Bizo (acquired by LinkedIn for $175M) and StartApp (Deloitte’s #1 fastest growing tech company in the US ). We’ve seen the power of advanced analytics […]
I’m thrilled today to welcome Peter Lee as the new CEO of RapidMiner. When we invested in RapidMiner in February of this year, we enthusiastically backed founder Ingo Mierswa and his vision to bring powerful, predictive analytics to the business analyst. Under Ingo’s leadership, the RapidMiner team developed the leading next generation predictive analytics platform […]
Today I’m happy to announce Ascent’s newest portfolio company, RapidMiner. In leading the $15M Series B financing of RapidMiner, we are following through on an investment theme I’ve been pursuing for several years – bringing advanced analytics to the business analyst. As we’ve all seen, there’s been tremendous hype around big data, but unfortunately many […]
A recent look at 2015 innovations trends by IDC shows significant growth in nearly every area impacting enterprise IT – including cloud, big data and analytics, mobile and internet of things. In fact, cloud services, a hotbed of activity in 2014, will likely accelerate in 2015 with $118 billion in spending on the greater cloud […]
Our last BYOD Index in March 2013 might have represented the apex of BYOD hype. Back then, BYOD or “Bring your Own Device” mentions across social channels reached about 2,600 per day, with 80,000 mentions during the entire month. While BYOD wasn’t a new concept in March 2013, it was still a hot industry topic […]
There’s a common misconception that engineers and data scientists are “number crunchers,” and are not creative. They use the left side of their brains, as the popular opinion goes, to present stodgy, black-and-white data, trends, ideas, etc. The “creatives” reside on the other side of the company, immersed in the innovative and artistic work – […]
Last week, when I was at the Xconomy Future of Big Data event moderating a panel on analytics & data infrastructure, one of the speakers essentially said the term ‘Big Data’ is somewhat meaningless. He’s right, of course; there are too many important sub-categories for one overarching term to have any real meaning. He also […]
Forbes last week listed the “10 Greatest Industry-Disrupting Startups of 2012,” citing “amazing” companies rapidly transforming industries that affect our daily lives. It was nice to see one of our portfolio companies, ClickFox, recognized in the article. Ascent has seen extraordinary innovation, both within our portfolio and the broader market, from companies that create business […]
