General Electric’s venture capital arm has invested an undisclosed amount in Tamr, the “data unification” software firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Boston-based GE (NYSE: [[ticker:GE]]) tapped Tamr in 2014 to help it unify and clean up data from more than 270 separate systems across multiple GE businesses, with the goal of creating an accurate, comprehensive picture of the giant corporation’s direct spending. Using a combination of its machine learning-based software and staff expertise, Tamr has helped GE identify ways it could save hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a press release.
That work led to the investment by GE Ventures. Tamr previously raised at least $41.2 million from backers including Hewlett Packard Ventures, Thomson Reuters, MassMutual Ventures, NEA, and GV.
Tamr’s other customers include Toyota, Thomson Reuters, HP, and Amgen. The company was founded in 2013 by Andy Palmer, the founding CEO of Vertica Systems, and Michael Stonebraker, the MIT professor, database systems pioneer, and A.M. Turing Award winner.
GE Ventures backs a variety of companies across sectors of strategic value to its parent company—software and analytics, healthcare, energy, lighting, connected devices, advanced manufacturing, robotics, logistics, enterprise software, and more. GE Ventures’ other Boston-area bets include Desktop Metal, Catalant (formerly known as HourlyNerd), Rethink Robotics, Iora Health, and 1366 Technologies. GE Ventures’ other investments this year include Portworx, a data services firm; logistics software startup Freightos; and digital health startup HealthReveal.
