Investors are bullish on SparkCognition's approach to using artificial intelligence to improve cybersecurity systems and predictive analytics at big oil and gas and aerospace companies.
The Austin-based startup today announced that it has completed its Series B funding round. The company had already reported a $32.5 million round last June. Now, SparkCognition says it has secured an additional $24 million, bringing the Series B to $56.5 million.
It has raised a total of $73.5 million since its founding in 2014.
The new money would make SparkCognition's Series B the largest funding round of 2017, although the timing of the round's second portion spreads it over two calendar years. (The Zebra raised a $40 million Series B in 2017.)
New investors in SparkCognition's Series B include CME Ventures, Brevan Howard Investment Holdings Limited, Invenergy Future Fund, as well as two Cisco veterans -- former CEO and chairman, John Chambers, and former EVP and chief development officer, Pankaj Patel. The earlier portion of its Series B was led by Verizon Ventures and Boeing's HorizonX fund.
“We are grateful for the many successes to date, but SparkCognition is still in the very early phases of realizing its potential as a transformative company,” Amir Husain, founder and CEO of SparkCognition, said in a news release. “We are honored to gain numerous industry leading investors and receive support as we rapidly grow to take our place at the forefront of the ‘AI 3.0’ revolution.”
SparkCognition's new funding is part of a wave of recent investment in Austin-based AI and machine learning companies. Last year saw large funding rounds for Austin's CognitiveScale, Conversable, Tethr, Cerebri AI and others.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story said SparkCognition had raised a total of $63.3M. That was according to Crunchbase. A company representative said the total is actually $73.5M.
