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 […]
Guest post by Todd Christy, Slalom Consulting and member of Ascent’s Technical Advisory Board. What do flat tires and Hadoop have in common? If you’re one of the 75 million drivers covered by the largest US roadside services provider you may experience the real value of “big data” when your tow truck arrives promptly to swap […]
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 – […]
Since the advent of IBM’s punch cards in the 1920s, the information technology industry has fostered improved decision making through data analysis. But the pace of progress has accelerated dramatically over the last decade, with storage costs dropping at an incredible pace (the price for a gigabyte of storage has fallen 99.5 percent since 2000), […]
At Ascent, we have been focused on the growth of data analytics – or as we called it back in 2008, the ”Explosion of Data” – for close to a decade. In the early days we backed companies such as ZoomInfo, Cymfony (acq. by TNS) and Bizo that comb the web, collecting data to build professional […]
We’ve long been excited at Ascent about the tremendous potential gains from the analysis of data and the complex business problems it can solve. And now I believe we’ve reached the point that organizations need to begin the shift toward data-driven decision making that can move the needle. But for many businesses, this shift is […]
I enjoyed speaking on a big data panel at the E2 Conference on Wednesday in Boston, but the more I participate in these events, the more I agree that “big data” is a silly marketing term, a meaningless catch-all that provides answers to nothing. Perhaps it is needed to make a distinction from traditional data […]
