Rasgo Intelligence, the feature store that is transforming how data scientists engineer, collaborate on, and operationalize Machine Learning (ML) features, announced today a $20M Series A investment round led by Insight Partners, with continued support from Unusual Ventures. This brings Rasgo’s total funding to over $25M since its founding.
Rasgo was founded by Jared Parker and Patrick Dougherty in 2020 to amplify the impact of data science by enabling endusers to explore, clean, join, and transform data into highly curated ML features at 10x velocity.
In less than 12 months, Rasgo has accomplished the following:
“At AES, our mission is to accelerate the future of energy together, improving lives by delivering greener and smarter energy solutions helping everyone on a global scale take part in the evolution of energy. To accomplish this, we are leveraging Machine Learning andArtificial Intelligence across our energy businesses, but it is not a simple process.” said Sean Otto, Head of Data Science and Analytics at AES. “To simplify, accelerate, and scale our AI and ML efforts, we are leveraging Rasgo to create and serve ML features as fast as we can think of them, reducing the time to designing unique and viable solutions from weeks to minutes.” Additionally, in the finance industry, Rasgo is being leveraged to accelerate predictions of financial instrument prices and market volatility. "Without Rasgo, we would have much difficulty tracking the predictive power of our features to quickly disseminate which trading strategies are delivering alpha,” said Christian Peressin, Manager at ChisholmFinancial Labs, a leading algorithmic hedge fund; “with Rasgo, we can quickly serve and track features in our ML pipeline, which increases the velocity of our experiment and development loop and enables us to deploy new trading strategies faster.”
“In working with thousands of data scientists, we saw first-hand that data science projects continuously fail due to technical limitations and inefficiencies in the feature engineering process,” said Jared Parker, Rasgo founder and CEO. “Many ML projects never made it to production, and those that did were plagued with end user frustration due to the sheer time it took to clean, join, and transform data. At Rasgo, we are building a platform that enables data scientists to access and transform data into highly curated ML features in minutes, not weeks. Our early customers have eliminated the feature engineering bottleneck and are now creating more accurate features and models, which have allowed them to finally achieve tangible financial value from ML.”
Rasgo is also dedicated to accelerating adoption of the Data Cloud for data science and has developed an integration with Snowflake.“At Snowflake, we are continuing to build new capabilities for data scientists and data engineers,” said Snowflake Director of Technology Alliances, Tarik Dwiek. “Rasgo can help our customers use Snowflake to unlock net new use cases and develop high quality ML features that are ready for production. This can represent significant acceleration of ML projects.”
Rasgo will use this funding round to accelerate product development, expand its team with a focus on engineering talent, and build out its go-to-market function.
“For most organizations, data science teams have been largely operating as researchers. Now, they’re being asked to operationalize their efforts and deliver quantifiable results to the bottomline,” said Patrick Dougherty, Rasgo founder and CTO. “This is a significant transition for data science teams. More often than not, unexpected process and technology limitations are unearthed, preventing teams from successfully making this transition. Rasgo’s feature store has already changed that paradigm for our customers, but there are so many more opportunities for us to amplify enduser value. We’re thrilled to have the capital to hire and grow our world-class engineering team and develop new capabilities to contribute to the data science community.”
“Rasgo stands out as a best-in-class experience for feature engineering, helping data scientists and ML practitioners accelerate a traditionally manual process and transform raw data into actionable insights,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at InsightPartners. “The traction they have seen since founding exemplifies the need fora product that can help data teams increase efficiency for the whole organization. MLOps is a burgeoning sector that we are very excited about andare now thrilled to add Rasgo to our growing portfolio.”
About Unusual Ventures
Unusual Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinctive advantage to both consumer and enterprise entrepreneurs. Unusual is rethinking the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with programmatic and hands-on services—such as the Unusual Field Guide, the Get Ahead Platform, and Unusual Academy—and by engaging with a number of HBCUs and other community-based organizations, including non-profits and children's hospitals, as their limited partner base. Described as a partner versus a top down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser focused on serving exceptional founders, world-class teams, and innovative products. For more information, visit: www.unusual.vc
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight Partners has invested in more than 400companies worldwide and has raised through a series of funds more than $30billion in capital commitments. Insight's mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Across its people and its portfolio, Insight encourages a culture around a belief that ScaleUp companies and growth create opportunity for all. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.
