Collaborative Data Science: Our Investment in Dataiku

The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past thirty, driving incredible opportunities for enterprises that can harness this asset to deliver more value to their stakeholders. No matter the department or function, nearly everyone who makes decisions at any level can benefit from using richer data to more efficiently reach their goals. On the front-end, companies benefit by leveraging data science to enable superior customer experiences, for example, delivering personalized product recommendations, predicting service disruptions, or more efficiently responding to customer support queries. On the back end, effective application of machine learning and data-driven processes is key to propelling the flywheel of rising labor productivity that has driven increased global economic prosperity and corporate profits for the past century.

In addition to the heavy-lift of managing the basic infrastructure required to handle data at this scale, today enterprises face many challenges in aligning line-of-business and technical stakeholders to scale these internal data science projects from experiments into core processes that drive high value. Further, enterprises face an incredibly competitive labor market for classically trained data science talent forcing them to upskill existing workers to meet their needs. This leads to a mix of technical and less-technical skillsets involved in data science work across different departments and creates significant barriers to turning the hypothetical promise of modern data science into high impact, real-world solutions that can scale.

Dataiku’s Solution

Dataiku removes barriers to achieving the promise of data science in the enterprise with a central workbench that seamlessly abstracts underlying infrastructure complexity while allowing data scientists and business analysts to work the way they want – whether coding in Jupyter notebooks, a drag-drop GUI, or consuming output in dashboards. This flexible approach keeps everyone on the same platform, making collaboration dramatically easier, boosting replicability, and removing barriers to knowledge transfer – ultimately leading to faster time to production and value.

Additionally, Dataiku, unlike products from many cloud vendors, is agnostic to underlying data storage and compute infrastructure—whether on-premise, cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid. Dataiku’s unique approach gives enterprises flexibility to switch out the underlying infrastructure components like databases or compute engines without breaking the data preparation and production model workflows that sit on top of them. This allows customers to be more agile in taking advantage of new technologies as the market rapidly evolves.

Ultimately, no other product on the market today combines the breadth, power, and inclusivity of Dataiku’s Data Science Studio while delivering the enterprise-class security and flexibility required for today’s modern environment.

Stripes Leads Dataiku’s $100 million Series D Financing

We’re pleased to announce our lead investment in Dataiku’s $100 million Series D, a company whose platform exemplifies two of our key investing theses: leveraging automation and machine learning to drive efficiency and delivering first-class customer experiences. We invested because we believe Dataiku has the best product in the market to solve the challenges enterprises around the globe face in turning data science ambitions into tangible realities that can be operationalized at scale. Customers across industries and around the world, including Unilever, Ubisoft, General Electric, and Morgan Stanley already use and love Dataiku’s product, and we believe they are only beginning to scratch the surface of this giant, rapidly growing market. Ultimately, democratizing access to data science will mean that nearly every corporate function across every major industry will be able to benefit from data-driven decision making – and we believe that Dataiku’s rich, collaborative and extensible product platform will drive this transformation.

We are excited to partner with Florian and the rest of Dataiku’s team. Throughout our conversations with Florian, now dating back several years, he has maintained a humble, but clear-eyed and convicted vision for the future of enterprise data science, and how enabling frictionless collaboration as part of a powerful, flexible and secure platform is a key to unlocking the full potential of the market. This seemingly simple concept is devilishly difficult to achieve – yet Dataiku has proven their ability to build a product that can address the complex needs of demanding technical data scientists, fast-moving business analysts, and everyone in-between - a testament to the intentional and elegant design of their product. We are very excited to have the opportunity to contribute our resources at Stripes to help Dataiku democratize data science for enterprises around the globe while building a world-class enterprise software company in the process.

[1] IDC Global DataSphere, May 2020