MindsDB Scores $7.6m Seed Funding to Democratize Machine Learning

MindsDB announces partnership with Snowflake, SingleStore & Datastax

San Francisco, CA — November 1, 2021 — MindsDB, an open-source machine learning (ML) startup that brings machine learning (ML) to databases, announced today 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.

With MindsDB’s platform, companies can leverage machine learning capabilities with standard SQL knowledge, allowing enterprises to lower development costs while accelerating machine learning capabilities. The platform is already used by several thousand open-source developers for everything from forecasting heart disease risk 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.”

Additionally, MindsDB today announced partnerships with Snowflake, SingleStore, and DataStax (based on Apache CassandraTM) to connect its machine learning platform to these databases. Through these partnerships, MindsDB users can make their data stores into predictive engines by leveraging advanced ML from MindsDB inside these platforms.

“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.”