Bain Capital Ventures invests in seed to growth-stage startups that are using tech to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones.  The firm invests from seed to growth in enterprise software, infrastructure software, and industries being transformed by data.  Bain Capital Ventures has helped launch and commercialize 200-plus companies since 2000, including investments in DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, LinkedIn, Rapid7, SurveyMonkey, Taleo, and TellApart. Bain Capital Ventures has more than $5.2 billion of assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Boston.

Bain Capital Ventures

Pandome

Akkio

Akkio is using artificial intelligence to transform the way they work with data. Anyone can now use generative analytics and machine learning to converse with live data, build charts and dashboards automatically, and precisely estimate critical business outcomes with upcoming speed and accuracy.

<div>Akkio is a cloud-based no-code machine learning platform to build AI-based models with a number of use cases, including intelligent process automation, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, data hygiene automation, and personalization. Users can upload data in multiple data formats, including .json, CSV, or Excel, to build a machine learning model, and can deploy it via an API, web application, or the platform&rsquo;s inbuilt Zapier integration.&nbsp;</div>

Now anyone can become a software developer.

No-code Software

Akkio is a cloud-based no-code generative analytics and ML platform to build AI-based models. The platform supports a number of use cases, including intelligent process automation, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, data hygiene automation, and personalization. The platform primarily caters to the sales, marketing, and finance functions, and has been used by several industries, including telcos, insurance, consumer electronics, and healthcare.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

Akkio is using artificial intelligence to transform the way they work with data. Anyone can now use generative analytics and machine learning to converse with live data, build charts and dashboards automatically, and precisely estimate critical business outcomes with upcoming speed and accuracy.

Data Infrastructure & Analytics

Akkio Launches the First Advertising Agency-Specific LLM

<div>
 
 Akkio is a cloud-based no-code machine learning platform to build AI-based models with a number of use cases, including intelligent process automation, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, data hygiene automation, and personalization. Users can upload data in multiple data formats, including .json, CSV, or Excel, to build a machine learning model, and can deploy it via an API, web application, or the platform&rsquo;s inbuilt Zapier integration.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company claims that the average training time of each model is around one minute compared to an hour for similar tools from larger competitors like Google, AWS, and Microsoft. Akkio also offers the &ldquo;Data Stories&rdquo; feature, which lets users understand which inputs are the most predictive in driving the AI models created. The company expanded its product features in February 2022 to&nbsp; allow integration with tools such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Airtable, Hubspot, Salesforce, and Google Sheets for AI-based insights and automation needs of users.
 
 
 Moreover, the platform integrates GPT-4 to provide generative AI capabilities to automate the process of data cleaning and preparation, as well as to explore data, identify patterns, find actionable insights, and report on business outcomes.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The platform primarily caters to the sales, marketing, and finance functions and has been used by several industries, including telcos, insurance, consumer electronics, and healthcare.&nbsp; As of February 2024, it served over 700 enterprise customers, including Fleetcor, Groupon, Getty Images, BPO, and CIC Health.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20473">
 In July 2023
 </a>
 , Akkio raised USD 15 million in a series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures and Pandome. The funding was to be used to expedite the commercialization of its platform.
 
</div>

Index offers a no-code platform for enterprises to build dashboards for internal use to obtain insights on business metrics, investor updates and operation overviews, among others. As of June 2021, the product remains at beta, with a limited early preview. The platform provides prebuilt templates, and also has tools for users to build their own dashboards. The dashboard can be integrated with multiple apps including Hubspot ((customer relationship management data), Stripe (payment data), and Postgres and MongoDB (databases), slack (remote working) and Google Sheets (spreadsheets), among others. The company raised USD 2.6 million in Seed funding in October 2020. It intends to invest the funds in hiring two engineers (in addition to the two founders) and continuing to refine and develop the product. The founders aim to reach USD 1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and expand their product distribution.

Index

<div>
 
 Stencyl offers a drag-and-drop no-code platform that enables users to create and publish web and mobile games. Users can build their game logic using the platform&rsquo;s pre-built code blocks, design visual elements via an in-built graphics editor, and publish across a range of platform&rsquo;s such as IoS, Android, Windows and Mac. Moreover,&nbsp; Stencyl also enables users to embed ads into their games as a secondary source of revenue.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 As of February 2024, Stencyl was used by over 500,000 registered developers. Apps created on Stencyl have reached top slots in the Apple App Store and Google Play, and its most successful web games have been sponsored by major publishers including ArmorGames, Kongregate, and Newgrounds.
 
</div>

Stencyl

Universe offers a no-code platform for users to build websites that can be added to social media pages. Websites can be built using drag and drop blocks to add images, videos, and other content to create a mobile-first website. The Platform offers creative controls, 30 pre-made themes, and block features to allow users to create a custom site and/or open an e-commerce store directly from a mobile phone.The company began as a landing page builder and progressed to developing websites, which include tools for adding shopping blocks. Universe targets micro businesses that are not tech-savvy.<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20509">In July 2023 </a>, Universe launched the beta version of Generative Universe Sites (GUS), an AI-powered website designing tool. This solution provides a conversational interface for users to dictate their requirements for a website and then generates a customized web page.Funding and financialsIn December 2021, Universe raised USD 30 million in a Series B funding round led by Addition to develop the company’s block-based system for website building named “GRID,” expand its commercial offering for startups, and extend GRID to more platforms and devices. Additionally, the company used the funds to expand its reach in new markets and grow its employee base.

Universe

Readymag is a web-based drag and drop tool that enables users to create websites, presentations and digital magazines. Its customers include large enterprises such as AirBnB, Forbes, Esquire, and IDEO.

Readymag

UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool that helps create interactive guides for customers. Functions include user onboarding, feature adoption, in-product messaging, and customer feedback, among others. As of September 2020, the company had over 2,000 global enterprise clients. UserGuiding raised USD 1.1 million in seed funding in August 2020, which it intends to use to expand its operations by increasing its workforce, accelerating global expansion, and enhancing product development.

UserGuiding

Allows users to create apps for their own businesses by using their data and ideas and converting them into apps to improve their workflow.

Platforms that allow users to create online/mobile games in a no-code environment.

Platforms and tools that enable users to build mobile-based apps using templates and tools (widgets) in a visual environment.

Platforms that let users create workflow and process management systems in a spreadsheet format integrating with databases. This also includes data science tools, which enable users to run predictive analysis on data sets through drag-and-drop functions using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Tools that allow users to build websites, ranging from blogs to e-commerce sites, in a visual environment without the need for coding. Often has no-code tools to integrate with other online tools, such as payment gateways.

Offers solutions for building internal applications and automations for enterprises

Many solutions enable users to leverage AI/ML for predictive analytics

Offers solutions for building enterprise-specific applications and automations

Some solutions leverage GenAI to enable users to build application and website templates without coding

Akkio is a cloud-based no-code generative analytics and ML platform to build AI-based models. The platform supports a number of use cases, including intelligent process automation, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, data hygiene automation, and personalization. The platform primarily caters to the sales, marketing, and finance functions, and has been used by several industries, including telcos, insurance, consumer electronics, and healthcare.Users can upload data in multiple data formats, including .json, CSV, or Excel, to build a ML model, and can deploy it via an API, web application, or the platform’s inbuilt Zapier integration. The company claims that the average training time of each model is around one minute compared to an hour for similar tools from larger competitors like Google, AWS, and Microsoft. Akkio also offers the “Data Stories” feature, which lets users understand which inputs are the most predictive in driving the AI models created. In addition, the platform integrates GPT-4 to provide generative AI capabilities to automate the process of data cleaning and preparation, as well as to explore data, identify patterns, find actionable insights, and report on business outcomes.The platform also integrates with tools such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Airtable, Hubspot, Salesforce, and Google Sheets for AI-based insights and automation needs of users. The company offers its platform through a freemium model, with plans starting at USD 49 per month.Funding and financialsIn July 2023, Akkio raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20584">USD 15 million in a series A </a>funding round co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and Pandome. The funding was to be used to expedite the commercialization of its platform.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

Fivetran is a cloud-based automated data integration platform that enables businesses to move data from various sources, including SaaS applications, databases, and files, into data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations. The company's platform offers multiple deployment models to meet diverse business needs, ranging from stringent security requirements to maintaining on-premises databases even after partial cloud migration.The company's data movement platform is designed to automate and streamline the process of extracting, loading, and transforming (ELT) data, empowering organizations to focus on data-driven insights and decision-making. With real-time analytics, database replication, AI workflows, and cloud migrations facilitated by Fivetran, thousands of customers worldwide can leverage the platform to drive business growth.Fivetran's core offering revolves around its connector library, which supports over 500 data sources, including SaaS applications, databases, ERPs, and files. These connectors enable automatic, reliable, and secure data movement, regardless of whether the data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The platform's scalable architecture allows businesses to seamlessly add or remove data sources as their needs evolve.To enhance the usability and accessibility of the ingested data, Fivetran employs a normalized schema approach. By delivering data in a normalized format, the platform enables customers to remix and reshape the data according to their specific requirements, facilitating efficient data analysis and reporting. Additionally, Fivetran offers pre-built data models and dbt Core integration, empowering customers to create analytics-ready tables tailored to their business use cases, such as analyzing deal opportunities from Salesforce, generating general ledger reports from QuickBooks data, or evaluating return on ad spend across advertising platforms.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/30203">June 2024</a>, the company launched Managed Data Lake Service to simplify the process of managing data lakes for businesses of any size. Key benefits include the ability to centralize data for insights and convenience. Furthermore it reduces costs by discontinuing support for legacy data warehouses.Key customers and partnershipsOver the years, Fivetran has attracted a diverse range of customers across various industries, including ecommerce, finance, technology, and media. Notable clients include Autodesk, Conagra Brands, JetBlue, Lionsgate, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis, among others. These companies leverage Fivetran's platform to streamline their data integration workflows, optimize their analytics capabilities, and gain a competitive edge through data-driven decision-making.To further enhance its offerings and enable seamless integrations, Fivetran has established strategic partnerships with various technology providers, including data warehousing solutions, cloud platforms, and business intelligence tools. For instance, Fivetran collaborates with Databricks, enabling customers to build an open lakehouse with Delta Lake powered by the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Additionally, Fivetran's integration with Unity Catalog provides out-of-the-box governance and security for Fivetran-generated tables.

Fivetran

<div>
 
 Domo is a cloud-based analytics platform that enables businesses to connect, transform, and visualize data from various sources. It provides a comprehensive solution for data management, analysis, and visualization, empowering organizations to make data-driven decisions. Domo's platform is designed to foster collaboration, efficient decision-making, and improved business outcomes through its user-friendly interface and powerful data manipulation capabilities.
 
 
 Domo's key offerings include data integration, data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and intelligent applications. The platform leverages its Adrenaline engine and offers over 1,000 pre-built connectors to extract data from cloud applications, databases, spreadsheets, and other sources. This data is then stored in Domo's internal data warehouse or accessed through federated queries, enabling users to analyze and visualize it using Domo's extensive collection of visualization tools and dashboards.
 
 
 Domo&rsquo;s user experience is designed to be intuitive and accessible, fostering high adoption rates across organizations. Its user-friendly interface, seamless collaboration features, and mobile-first approach contribute to its widespread adoption and ease of use. Domo's platform is built for speed and scalability, allowing organizations to quickly access and analyze even large datasets without experiencing performance issues.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Domo serves over 2,300 customers across various industries, including major enterprises such as eBay, Walmart, Cisco, Citibank, HP, The National Geographic Society, Verizon, US Army, Vanguard, Microsoft, IBM, Thomson Reuters, Airbus, Orange, AT&amp;T, Caterpillar, Volvo Cars, and Comcast.
 
 
 The platform has been widely adopted by organizations seeking to leverage data for better decision-making, improved customer insights, and enhanced marketing analytics. Domo has formed strategic partnerships with companies like Regional One Health and Torchy's Tacos, enabling them to leverage Domo's capabilities for healthcare metrics and finance applications, respectively.
 
</div>

Domo

Founded in 2014, Confluent, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company specializes in data streaming platforms, primarily based on Apache Kafka, an open-source project created by Confluent's founders while working at LinkedIn. Confluent offers two main products: Confluent Platform, an on-premise solution, and Confluent Cloud, a fully managed SaaS. These products help organizations harness real-time data streams for various applications, including microservices, Internet of Things (IoT), financial services, fraud detection, and customer analytics.Confluent's primary offering in data infrastructure services is its integration solution, which enables organizations to unify data from disparate sources. The Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud act as clients' central nervous systems, allowing them to connect various IT systems and applications to capture and process real-time data streams. This capability enables businesses to make decisions based on continuously flowing data.In September 2024,&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33818">Confluent announced upgrades to its Confluent Cloud</a> product, enhancing support for Apache Flink. The updates include support for the Table API, simplifying development for Java and Python users, and private networking support to improve data security. These upgrades aimed to simplify Flink deployments, enhance security, and make it easier for organizations in regulated industries to stream data and integrate it into applications.Key customers and partnershipIn December 2023, Confluent expanded partnerships with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz as part of its "Data Streaming for AI" initiative. These partnerships aimed to provide real-time contextual data from Confluent's platform to partners' vector databases, facilitating the development of AI-powered applications.

Confluent

<div>
 
 dbt Labs provides an open source data transformation tool that uses analytics engineering. It is aimed at programmers with knowledge of SQL to develop models with SELECT statements, test and document each model, and install safely with Git-enabled version control. The software enables the user to develop faster, work from the same assumptions, deploy with confidence, and&nbsp; ensure low risk with governance and safety. The company also offers dbt Core, which is an open source software for analytics engineers, and dbt Cloud Enterprise for secure, reliable access to data. JetBlue and Domain are some of its clients.
 
 
 
</div>

dbt Labs

<div>
 
 Starburst uses the open source Trino to give its customers a modern solution in the form of one of the fastest analytics search engines, with reliable security, around the clock support and connectors. The platform offers Starburst Enterprise, an option that allows users to deploy, connect, and manage data anywhere, and Starburst Galaxy, which provides a superior MPP SQL engine on an easy to use platform. Some of Starburst&rsquo;s customers are EMIS, Zalando, Finra and Priceline. The company also works with consultancy partners, cloud partners, technology partners, and managed service provider partners.
 
</div>

Starburst

Solutions to unify data from disparate sources by extracting, transforming, loading, and storing data in a usable form (such as in data warehouses) for further analysis.

Tools to monitor data for quality issues in real-time, as it moves throughout the data pipeline.

Providers of storage solutions that help accelerate data analytics. These include primary storage solutions, such as data warehouses and data lakes, and secondary storage solutions for non-mission-critical data.

Solutions that enable businesses to carry out data processing and create ML models on the underlying data for predictive analysis.

Tools for enterprises to visualize data in a graphical form and obtain insights on the same using AI and natural language processing.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for data infrastructure & analytics.

Leverages GenAI to help organizations extract insights and supports GenAI application development through data preparation

Offers data analytics and storage platforms for business under a B2B SaaS model

These are tools that help prepare data for AI/ML applications

Akkio

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