Digest: Funding Wins and Buy for US Data Firms

VC funding continues to flow for data firms in the US. Collaborative data platform Dropbase has raised $1.75m, no-code data exploration platform Datawisp $3.6m, and crypto intell specialist Merkle Science $19m; while marketing and analytics platform NinjaCat has acquired Shape.io.

Dropbase's round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, with participation from others including Y Combinator and Unpopular Ventures, plus angels. The company was founded by current CEO Jimmy Chan and CTO Ayazhan Zhakhan, and allows user companies to import, validate, manage and query all their data from CSV/Excel files inside fully-featured SQL databases optimized for handling large amounts of data, with no technical help required.

Datawisp's platform is focused on web3 and gaming, and promises non-technical users the ability to build complex queries and dashboards using a '100% visual language that replaces code'. The seed round was led by CoinFund, with participation from Spartan Capital, Mirana Ventures, Dweb3 Capital, and existing investors Play Ventures; and will be used to grow the team, improve the platform, and scale its infrastructure to support larger clients.

New York firm NinjaCat says the integration of Shape.io's budget monitoring and automation capabilities and the joining of its leadership, engineering and sales teams will accelerate its mission to deliver an all-in-one platform to store, report, monitor, analyze and act on marketing data at scale. According to CEO Paul Deraval, 'By integrating Shape.io directly into the NinjaCat platform, our customers can now seamlessly track cross-channel ad spend alongside a wide range of other metrics. This allows us to move even faster towards our goal of delivering a single source of truth for all marketing data in one place'. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but NinjaCat says it will now have 350 customers managing more than half a million digital campaigns and $7B in advertising spend across the platform.

LA-based predictive crypto risk and intelligence platform Merkle Science has added more than $19m to its Series A funding round, bringing the total raised to over $24m. BECO Capital, Susquehanna affiliate (Darrow Holdings), and K3 Ventures co-led the extension, joined by a number of new and existing investors. CEO and co-founder Mriganka Pattnaik comments: 'We've seen over 300% growth over the past year, despite the onset of a severe bear market in crypto and throughout the broader global economy. Web3 companies, financial institutions, and regulators are continuing to invest heavily in crypto compliance and forensics. Recent high-profile events in the space, including the failure of large companies and massive hacks, are a clear indicator of the need for much more robust risk management, forensics and compliance for digital assets'. Funds will be used for expansion across the US and Europe, and for R&D.

Web sites: www.dropbase.io , www.datawisp.com , www.ninjacat.io and www.merklescience.com . Logo... obviously... that of NinjaCat.

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