Pachyderm Secures $16 Million Investment Led by M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund

Company raises Series B round on back of Fortune 500 enterprise adoption

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pachyderm, an enterprise-grade, open source platform that enables explainable, repeatable, and scalable data science, today announced it has raised $16 million in Series B financing led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Jon Sakoda of Decibel Ventures, an independent venture firm backed by Cisco, also joined the round alongside returning investors including Benchmark and YCombinator, among others. M12’s investment was led by Microsoft Corporate Vice President and the fund’s Global Head Nagraj Kashyap, who will join Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta on Pachyderm’s board of directors.

“M12 and Decibel will prove essential to our expansion,” said Joey Zwicker, Co-founder of Pachyderm, “With their experience supporting the growth of B2B startups and their direct access to Microsoft’s and Cisco’s strength, expansive enterprise network and diversity of investments, we see them as essential partners for our next stage of growth.”

Since launching in 2014, Pachyderm’s data science platform has become a critical tool within the machine learning software stack by providing AI development teams with a reliable, single source of truth for their machine learning pipelines. Over the past year, Pachyderm has attracted enterprise customers including Shell, LogMeIn, Battelle Ecology and AgBiome, as well as multiple government agencies, pharmaceutical and bioinformatics companies, two major North American banks, and others within the Fortune 500. Pachyderm allows these companies to quickly comply with emerging AI legal standards and ensures that Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) teams can always recreate data science experiments perfectly every time.

“Value from AI is not just about the first great insight. It’s ensuring that every insight only gets more accurate with time,” said Vaibhav Kumar, Software Engineering Fullstack Development Manager at Shell. “Pachyderm’s ability to deliver data lineage to data scientists is a great leap towards explainable AI.”

The latest round of funding comes as Pachyderm launches the general availability of Pachyderm Hub, Pachyderm’s fully-managed service solution that has been operating in public beta since November, which is available today. With Pachyderm Hub, individuals and enterprise teams can get a Pachyderm cluster on-demand without having to take on the operational burden of managing their own infrastructure. Those interested in the GA can sign up for free here.

“We’re excited to witness the acceleration of Pachyderm’s enterprise adoption as data versioning becomes an imperative for organizations of all sizes,” said Kashyap. “Pachyderm is on its way to becoming the next big data infrastructure company as enterprises aim to mirror best practices from the DevOps domain. M12 looks forward to partnering in that journey.”

Pachyderm will use the funding to accelerate hiring, continue building Pachyderm Hub and expand on its vision to provide enterprises with explainable and repeatable data processing at scale.

About Pachyderm

Pachyderm is an enterprise-grade, open source data science platform that makes explainable, repeatable, and scalable machine learning and artificial intelligence possible. The platform brings together version control for data with the tools to build scalable end-to-end machine learning and artificial intelligence pipelines while empowering users to use any language, framework, or tool they want. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Benchmark, M12, YCombinator and others. For more information, follow Pachyderm on Twitter @pachyderminc or visit https://www.pachyderm.com/ or https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm.

About M12

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, invests in enterprise software companies primarily in the Series A through C funding stages with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. As part of its value-add to portfolio companies, M12 offers unique access to strategic go-to-market resources and relationships globally. M12 has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru. https://m12.vc