feature-engineering
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Tecton and the Price of a Millisecond
Tecton made a business of getting fresh data to a model before the moment to decide has passed. Its journey from Uber infrastructure to Databricks acquisition shows why the least glamorous part of AI can be the part customers pay for.
Chalk and the 24-Hour Problem
A live shopping app cannot recommend a show that did not exist when last night's batch ran. Chalk built its business around the moment stale data becomes an expensive mistake.
dotData
dotData is a Silicon Valley enterprise AI company that automates the most time-consuming part of data science: feature engineering. Spun out of NEC Corporation in 2018 and led by founder Ryohei Fujimaki, dotData builds software that automatically discovers signals hidden across multiple data tables and turns them into predictive features and business hypotheses. Its products - dotData Enterprise, Feature Factory, and the generative-AI-powered dotData Insight - let analysts and data scientists build models and surface KPI drivers in a fraction of the usual time, and are used heavily in financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and telecom.
PredictHQ
PredictHQ is a demand intelligence company that aggregates, verifies and enriches data on real-world events - concerts, sports, conferences, public holidays, severe weather, school breaks and more - into a single API-first source of truth. Companies plug this verified context into their forecasting models, AI systems and operational workflows to explain and predict demand shifts they would otherwise miss. Founded in Auckland in 2015 and now headquartered in San Francisco, PredictHQ counts Uber, Domino's, Expedia Group, Instacart, Walgreens and IHG among its customers, and says its data can explain more than 60% of demand variability.
LanceDB
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.