Ocient Inc. has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round, bringing the Chicago-based data analytics company's total funding to $260 million. The company said the new capital will speed delivery of its OcientAIQ Solutions, which let AI agents and human analysts query datasets at petabyte scale. The round was co-led by Boka Capital Ltd. and OCA Ventures LLC.
Ocient expects revenue to more than triple in its current fiscal year, which ends in January, after doubling the prior year. Chief Executive John Morris attributed much of the growth to new customers in national security and telecommunications, particularly organizations consolidating cybersecurity information. He said those customers have been accustomed to sampling network data because they lacked systems able to handle the ingest rates or to store tens of petabytes affordably.
The OcientAIQ Unified Data Platform combines ingestion, analytics, governance and agent orchestration. Its architecture minimizes data movement and uses forward error correction rather than conventional replication for data protection with less storage overhead. Morris said the design avoids constantly moving data and keeps nothing replicated.
Ocient competes with Snowflake Inc., Databricks Inc. and open-source analytics implementations, though Morris said its technology frequently complements existing platforms rather than replacing them. Cybersecurity has emerged as a promising market: Ocient supplies the underlying data infrastructure that lets security tools and AI agents examine network activity across complete historical datasets, potentially catching threats that sampling would miss. Morris said the company is not positioned as a cybersecurity tool and does not do detection algorithms.
Government and defense customers make up a substantial portion of Ocient's business, and the company recently established a dedicated national security subsidiary to serve those markets. Morris said the new funding should be enough to reach breakeven but declined to give a timetable. Ocient plans to put much of the investment toward sales and customer delivery hiring while continuing engineering work.
Ocient is also seeing more demand for on-premises deployments as customers seek control over costs and sensitive information. Morris said most current opportunities are on-premises, driven by cost repatriation or data sovereignty and protection concerns. The company is looking to expand in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and to add cybersecurity customers.
Previous investors participating in the round included Greycroft Partners LLC, In-Q-Tel Inc., Blue Bear Capital LLC, Buoyant Ventures Management LLC, PSP Partners LLC's PSP Growth fund and Pritzker Group Venture Capital LLC.
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