Knoema, which offers a platform for data discovery and management, is announcing today that it will be acquired by holding company Eldridge Industries. It also shared that it will partner with Snowflake as a new data provider in the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Terms of Eldridge’s deal with Knoema were not disclosed.
Knoema works to make data more accessible and usable. According to materials Knoema sent to VentureBeat, its data repository includes over 3.8 billion KPIs sourced from 56,0000 datasets. Knoema’s proprietary technology enables its users to discover, visualize, and manage global decision-making data distributed across topics such as Agriculture and Crime Statistics and sources such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Datasets range from The Global Coal Plant Tracker to World Development Indicators.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Eldridge operating partner Michele Trogni said “Whether it’s ingesting data, normalizing it, or allowing great visualizations for distribution … [Knoema has] the end-to-end set of capabilities … and that was what attracted us.”
Eldridge invests in businesses across the technology, finance, real estate, and entertainment industries. Last month, Eldridge acquired publishing rights to rock band The Killers’ first five albums. The company also co-owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and has invested in technology applications such as Truebill. Trogni said “We can leverage the Knoema capabilities to help our end clients have better insights into the activities they are doing and help our portfolio companies to understand what data they’re producing every day.”
Snowflake has also invested in Knoema via Snowflake Ventures, the company’s ventures arm that invests about $1 million to $5 million in new solutions for its Data Cloud.
Stefan Williams, Snowflake’s head of corporate development and Snowflake Ventures, said in an email to VentureBeat that “Open and public data is increasingly relevant for enterprise analytics, and we’re excited to partner with Knoema to accelerate the availability of these datasets in the Snowflake Data Marketplace.”
Knoema joined the Snowflake Data Marketplace a few weeks ago and is now announcing this soft launch in conjunction with its acquisition news. The Snowflake Data Marketplace provides its enterprise users with access to live, ready-to-query data so they can more easily source and analyze data to make decisions. Data providers in the marketplace, like Knoema, then receive revenue for Snowflake consumers who use their governed data assets.
When VentureBeat profiled Knoema in 2012, the company had collected slightly over 500 datasets. Knoema now holds over 100 times that amount. Knoema CEO Charles Poliacof said in an interview with VentureBeat that “the needs and use cases [for data] that previously existed have dramatically changed. It’s a bit like going from dial-up to broadband … that massive paradigm shift you saw on the internet, you’re kind of seeing the same thing in data, where needs have shifted.”
“So our focus now,” Poliacof said, “is helping a lot of these institutions, these organizations, think through how they can get through these digital transfer, data transformation plans, and what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective? And what does that mean from a data usability perspective? That’s part of the reason why we’ve been working closely with a firm like Snowflake.”
