The Data and AI landscape 2021: It a MAD, MAD, MAD world

While much of the world closed down during the COVID-19 pandemic, the gates opened wide for financing early and late-stage startups in the data and AI space. A team at FirstMark Capital, led by partner Matt Turck, has issued the latest of its annual encyclopedic data and AI landscapes. At one end of the spectrum, Turck and colleagues wrote, there is the maturation as evidenced by the breakout IPOs of Snowflake and Confluent, reassuring the VC community that revenues and growth are real and that the onrush of funding is not triggering a replay of the dot com bubble. And yes, the report states that the promise of AI is now being borne out. We're seeing it crop up, not only in the tools that business analysts use like BI but also the fact that in-database machine learning is becoming a checkbox feature, not to mention that Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and others are now routinely incorporating machine learning into enterprise applications.