Ocient builds a hyperscale data warehouse designed to analyze trillions of data records at performance levels and costs that standard cloud data warehouses struggle to match. The Chicago-based company was founded in 2016 by CEO Chris Gladwin, who previously founded and sold Cleversafe to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2015.
The Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse is built from the ground up for petabyte-scale workloads with concurrent users, and the company reports performance 10 to 50 times faster than competing solutions on certain workloads, achieved partly through what its team calls a "compute adjacent" architecture that keeps processing near NVMe storage. Ocient has raised $49.4 million from investors including Greycroft, OCA Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA's strategic investment arm, pointing to interest from government-scale data use cases alongside commercial ones.
Ocient fits organizations and government agencies running massive-scale analytics, telecom, ad tech, and geospatial data among them, rather than teams with gigabyte- or terabyte-scale workloads better served by conventional warehouses. The company does not publish fixed pricing, instead pricing through a SaaS or managed-service monthly fee, a perpetual on-premises software license, or a managed-support model priced by CPU cores, all quoted through a custom cost analysis.
