Seed Funds for Data Science Firm Ponder

US-based data science start-up Ponder Data has announced $7m in seed funding, with which to commercialise its widely-used machine learning and analytics tools for users of the 'pandas' Python library.

Funds will be used to 'significantly scale' its team in 2022 to meet rising demand from enterprise customers and keep good levels of support for its open-source community of users.

According to Ponder, pandas is 'the most popular tool in data science, used by millions of data scientists to prepare, transform, and analyze data in machine learning workflows' - but is unusable on large datasets without reengineering for big data frameworks. A product of UC Berkeley, CA, the firm offers two open-source tools: Modin (pictured) - a scalable 'drop-in replacement' for pandas, allowing data scientists to scale up to large datasets; and Lux, a tool which automatically identifies visual insights from large and complex pandas datasets. Both tools work without users needing to change code. Users already include the likes of Bristol Myers Squibb and GSK, Intel and VMware, and Ford and Tesla.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Intel Capital, 8VC and The House Fund. Gaurav Gupta, Partner at Lightspeed, comments: 'Pandas is the de-facto swiss-army knife of data science, leveraged across industries for data exploration and machine learning. Unfortunately, it presents users with roadblocks when working with even moderately large datasets. Ponder's open-source technology addresses these issues, positioning the company to become a market leader in scalable data science'. Ponder CEO Doris Lee comments: 'With Ponder's tools, data scientists no longer have to pick between convenience and scale: they can get both'.

Web site: www.ponder.io .