Tamr raises USD $21 million to expand AI data tools

Tamr has raised USD $21 million in growth equity financing, led by Volition Capital, to expand its artificial intelligence-based master data management business.

Existing investors also participated in the round. Tamr will use the capital to further develop its platform, focusing on what it describes as agentic data mastering features.

Master data management software helps large organisations combine records from multiple systems to create a consistent version of key business data. The issue has become more pressing as companies roll out artificial intelligence tools across their operations, while many still manage overlapping or incomplete records across customer, finance, procurement and other systems.

Tamr's platform is designed to unify, clean and enrich fragmented enterprise data so companies can work from a single source of truth. The business traces its origins to research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labouratory and was founded in 2013.

The company was co-founded by Dr Michael Stonebraker, Andy Palmer, Alex Pagan, Ihab Ilyas, Daniel Bruckner and George Beskales. Stonebraker later won the 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award, while Palmer is now Chairman and Pagan is Chief Technology Officer.

Tamr says it holds 19 patents in artificial intelligence and machine learning for mastering, clustering and data curation. Its software is used by organisations in insurance, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, technology, retail and higher education.

Growth push

The investment follows a period of revenue growth. Tamr says it more than doubled its software-as-a-service revenue in its previous fiscal year under chief executive officer Anthony Deighton.

The company has also been adding new artificial intelligence agents to its platform and updating its Curator Hub, which combines software-driven data curation with human oversight. Recent additions include a Bring Your Own Agent set-up for low-code integration of custom artificial intelligence agents, support for multi-domain mastering across products and locations, and enterprise knowledge graph functions aimed at mapping relationships across entities.

For customers, the appeal lies in preparing data for wider use in artificial intelligence systems. Financial services group Old Mutual said it adopted Tamr as its real-time master data management platform to manage multiple product systems and large volumes of records.

"We are on the accelerated path to becoming an AI-led financial services organisation, and that starts with having data that AI can trust. At our scale, mastering millions of records from multiple product systems, we chose Tamr with its AI-native approach as our group's real-time MDM platform. Tamr has partnered closely with Old Mutual Group over the years, delivering solutions to problems that the legacy systems could not facilitate, and we view Tamr capabilities as foundational to our group growth ambitions," said Dhesen Ramsamy, Group Chief Technology and Data Officer at Old Mutual.

Deighton said the company sees growing demand for reliable data as businesses move artificial intelligence projects beyond the pilot stage.

"As enterprises put AI to work across more of their operations, data quality and reliability become non-negotiable. I believe the only way to solve the messy, siloed data problem in the enterprise is by using AI to prepare data for AI applications. This new investment and partnership with Volition enable us to accelerate development of the agentic capabilities our customers need to solve this problem at scale," said Anthony Deighton, Chief Executive Officer at Tamr.

Volition Capital is backing the company as investors pay closer attention to the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence deployment in large organisations. The firm said data quality remains a major obstacle for many programmes moving into live operational use.

"Enterprise AI programs stall most often at the data layer, and budgets are increasingly shifting toward the data foundation as a result. But legacy rules-based engines won't solve the problem, and neither will AI bolted on to the side. Tamr is one of the very few data platforms that was AI-native before the term existed, where machine learning is the architecture and not a feature. That's what drew us in, and it's why blue-chip enterprises across industries have built their data foundations on Tamr," said Tomy Han, Partner at Volition Capital.

Volition Capital manages more than USD $2.6 billion in assets and has invested in more than 60 companies across software, internet and consumer markets.