ML Startup MindsDB Announces $7.6M Total Seed Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 1, 2021 — MindsDB, an open-source machine learning (ML) startup that brings ML to the database, today announced an investment from Walden Catalyst Ventures, closing out MindsDB’s total seed round to $7.6M. Walden Catalyst Ventures joins YCombinator, OpenOcean (the venture fund launched by the creators of MySQL and MariaDB), SpeedInvest, and the University of California Berkeley SkyDeck fund. MindsDB’s mission is to democratize ML by giving enterprise databases “a brain”, driving better, data-driven business decisions without enterprises needing to become AI developers or experts.

The MindsDB platform gives anyone with knowledge of standard SQL the ability to leverage sophisticated machine learning. This enables enterprises to accelerate the development of machine learning capabilities within their business while lowering development costs through decreased complexity. MindsDB has already gained an enthusiastic user base of several thousand open-source developers using the platform for everything from predictions of heart disease risk through to insurance premium forecasts.

“Enterprises urgently need to connect their database and systems of record with the latest innovations in machine learning and the breakthrough innovation MindsDB has with their platform means customers can access these models in minutes,” said Shankar Chandran, Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures. “Bringing the machine learning models to the data also has an exponential impact on operations, governance, and compliance that will drive further enterprise value.”

“We are very excited and grateful to be partnering with Walden Catalyst Ventures as part of their inaugural fund targeting deep-tech and focused on data, cloud, and artificial intelligence.” said Jorge Torres, Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB. “The increasing traction within enterprises leveraging machine learning models for practical applications that impact their businesses builds on the momentum we see in our open source community”

The company also confirmed partnerships with the world’s most scalable, multi-cloud databases, including Snowflake, SingleStore, and DataStax (built on Apache Cassandra™), to connect MindsDB’s machine learning platform to their respective data stores. The partnerships ensure that users of these data stores can take advantage of advanced ML from MindsDB from within those platforms, turning their databases into predictive engines.

“MindsDB is enabling organizations to significantly speed and simplify the development of enterprise AI applications and quickly build real-time machine learning models over multivariate time-series data using standard SQL commands,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “As part of our partnership, we look forward to extending these benefits to the Snowflake community, to help accelerate building of enterprise-grade data pipelines, applications, and machine learning workflows with Snowpark.”

“Running MindsDB with SingleStore can significantly increase the performance and reduce the computational requirements of training your machine learning models,” said Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Innovation Officer, SingleStore. “As our customers deploy enterprise AI applications at scale, the seamless integration with MindsDB and SingleStore will accelerate the development and deployment of complex AI and machine learning use cases.”

“Digital delivery in 2021 means low-latency global availability of data. Developers expect this type of capability on-demand with zero complexity,” said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Office, DataStax. “With Astra DB and MindsDB, enterprises across all sectors are increasingly able to leverage Open Source based machine learning to accelerate decision-making and innovation, reduce liability and mitigate risks, and serve up better experiences to their users.”

About Walden Catalyst

Walden Catalyst is a venture capital firm helping early-stage companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel build the next generation of category-defining businesses in deep tech. We back the bold and the daring—trailblazers who are changing the world and making life better for all of us. The firm is led by Young Sohn and Lip-Bu Tan, deep-tech industry pioneers who between them have invested in more than 560 startups across the globe, of which 115 have gone on to IPO. With $550 million under management, Walden Catalyst is a team of innovators and entrepreneurs who are passionate about disruption and committed to excellence. For startups, this translates into unparalleled access to operational expertise, global reach, and a network of industry captains eager to help build and scale the companies of the future.

About MindsDB

MindsDB helps anyone use the power of machine learning to ask predictive questions of their data and receive accurate answers from it. MindsDB was founded in 2017 by Adam Carrigan (COO) and Jorge Torres (CEO) and is backed with over $7.6M in seed funding from Walden Catalyst Ventures, YCombinator, OpenOcean, the venture fund launched by the creators of MySQL and MariaDB, SpeedInvest, and the University of California Berkeley SkyDeck fund. MindsDB is also a graduate of YCombinators recent Winter 2020 batch and was recently recognized as one of America’s most promising AI companies by Forbes. To see how MindsDB can help you visit www.mindsdb.com.

Source: MindsDB