Vyas Sekar has spent years calling up Muckai Girish, an old friend from undergrad, and seeking Girish's opinion with promising startup ideas. The two usually end the conversation with a single thought. When Sekar called Girish with an idea involving integrated data in early 2022; The conversation doesn't end when the phone hangs up.
Sekar and colleague Giulia Fanti of Carnegie Mellon University are working to solve the reproducibility crisis in academia, or the inability to reproduce data, by building a synthetic database. While Sekar saw the need for an educational solution; Girish then realized that his customers were facing the same problem. After discussions with some businesses, the document was further approved.
“At the time, it felt very right and an opportunity,” CEO Girish told TechCrunch. “So that's what started us, and over the next few months, some investors, People we know More importantly, businesses understand that this is a significant problem and know that they should put their whole lives behind it. “
The result is Rockfish, a startup that uses next-generation AI for operational workflows to help them crunch their data. Rockfish integrates with other database providers, including AWS and Azure, to help customers choose the best configuration for their data based on company policies or data usage.
Synthetic data has become a hot topic in the world of AI, but the company is already gaining momentum when it launches in June 2022. Girish says that Rockfish is building a product that differentiates itself from that. Partners and solutions businesses use every day, not just once.
Therefore, the company's product is designed to continuously enter data, transfer money, It focuses on operational data, which includes things like cybersecurity and supply chains. These fields are constantly generating and constantly changing data for companies. Focusing on this space helps differentiate Rockfish from other competitors, Girish believes.
The company now works with a handful of enterprise customers. Government departments including the US Army and the US Department of Defense, as well as streaming analytics platform Conviva, Girish said.
Rockfish is Foster Ventures; Announcing a $4 million seed round led by Emergent Ventures, with participation from TEN13 and Dallas VC. This brings the company's total funding to about $6 million.
Anupam Rastogi, managing partner at Emergent Ventures, told TechCrunch that he had been tracking Sekar long before he founded Rockfish. The reason for investing in the company is “the team; Market and product,” he said. In addition, Rockfish's focus on building for enterprises makes it a better fit for Emergent than some other players in the space.
“The team has high-quality data scientists, many with PhDs,” says Rastogi. “This is an area that we think is very technically sophisticated, and technical prowess at the table is really important. They have done a lot of groundwork, not just in the company but in the entire industry.”
Rockfish's focus is expected to help it gain ground among competitors, but that doesn't change the fact that integrated data could be a much bigger market. AI companies are turning to aggregated data, as many players have speculated. The market has run out of other AI training data..
Among them, there are already numerous startups trying to tackle the market. People who do AIRaised over $45 million in venture funding; Mostly AI.Raised $31 million in VC funding. versus It's cloudy.which raised $14.5 million before being acquired by SAS in 2024; To name just a few.
Girish said that the company is developing national space models, Girish said they are trying to synthesize the data by combining other types of modeling, such as mathematical models that use state variables. The company is looking to improve its end-to-end features.
“It's not like you take random data for the Internet and generate composite data,” Girish said. “There is no guarantee that this will be good. But if all these things are put together for businesses, it is very relevant and practical. So that's the key to this, We find it useful to be able to do that on an ongoing basis.”