TA Ventures, a major venture fund based in Ukraine but operating globally, has just taken part in a €5.5 million Series A round for its portfolio company data Artisans. Based in Berlin, this startup is developing “the next-generation large-scale data analysis technology” under the umbrella of the Apache Flink project.
The round was led by Intel Capital with participation from Tengelmann Ventures. Existing investors TA Ventures and B-to-V Partners, which already invested in the company at the seed stage in summer 2014, did a follow-on investment of an undisclosed amount.
TA Ventures did actually a little more than just following on: “We introduced the startup to Intel Capital, who as the result led the deal,” TA Ventures Senior Analyst Sergii Kravets told Ukraine Digital News.
Coming out of the Flink community itself, the data Artisans team presents itself as “good citizens of the Apache Flink community looking forward to continue developing the project in the open source.”
“It is our firm belief that in the future, the majority of data applications, including real-time analytics, continuous analytics, and historical data processing, will treat data as what it really is: unbounded streams of events. We will continue to implement this vision by hardening Flink together with the open source community and our partners,” the data Artisans team stated.
Ukrainian money for German companies
Over the past few years, TA Ventures has invested in no fewer than 24 German companies. Among them are Stylelounge, a metasearch engine for clothing and lifestyle products, in which the fund invested in June 2014 and August 2015.
Among these companies are also Amorelie, Flaconi and Luxodo, from which TA Ventures has already exited.
Led by Viktoriya Tigipko, a prominent figure on the Ukrainian IT and VC scene, TA Ventures has also invested in the USA, Europe, and emerging markets like Brazil and African countries. In India, the fund bet on Little Eye Labs. This startup, which develops a performance-analysis and monitoring tool, was acquired by Facebook in early 2014.
