Funds Drive Unsupervised Expansion

Boulder, Colorado-based big data firm Unsupervised has raised $35m in a series B funding round, for use in recruiting more employees and continued development of its platform.

Unsupervised is led by CEO and co-founder Noah Horton (pictured), currently employs around 75 people, and offers a one-stop platform for tasks including data preparation and aggregation, feature engineering and forecasting. The company name derives from the lack of instruction and annotation needed to start its programs learning: as opposed to Supervised learning which the firm says is 'meant for situations where humans generally understand what is happening in the data and are trying to get machines to replicate that understanding'.

The round, which brings the firm's total funding to date to more than $55m, was led by new investors Cathay Innovation and SignalFire, while previous backers Coatue, Eniac Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners and Elad Gil also joined.

The firm will recruit for sales, marketing, product development and engineering, customer success and people roles, and says it will also seek deeper strategic partnerships with other players in the data and analytics ecosystem.

Horton told VentureBeat: 'We're seeing a shift in the market where customers are seeking out analytics and AI platforms that don't just do simple reporting - they reveal opportunities to change the business. BI and traditional AI is great for probing handfuls of known problems, but when you're really trying to understand what's happening you need to investigate beyond known issues. This is where unsupervised learning is uniquely valuable. COVID really revealed the need for what we've built and this round will help us expand our footprint faster'.

Web site: www.unsupervised.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.