Chicago data analytics company Ocient has closed a $100 million Series C funding round to expand its agentic AI analytics business, the company announced on November 5. The round was co-led by BOKA Capital and OCA Ventures, with participation from all existing investors, and brings Ocient’s total capital raised to $260 million.

The new money will accelerate delivery of OcientAIQ Solutions, the company’s industry-specific offerings that let AI agents and human analysts query petabyte-scale datasets. Ocient said it expects revenue to more than triple in its current fiscal year, which ends in January, after doubling revenue the previous year.

“Our customers operate at a scale where the speed, quality, and reliability of an answer can have significant consequences,” said John Morris, CEO of Ocient, in the announcement. “Ocient was built to help organizations meet those requirements, and this investment, together with the expertise of our investors, will help us extend the reach of OcientAIQ to more customers as they scale their data and AI operations.”

What Was Announced?

The Series C was co-led by BOKA Capital and OCA Ventures. Returning investors in the round included Greycroft, In-Q-Tel, Blue Bear Capital, Buoyant Ventures, PSP Growth, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Eron Wolf, while Dallas Venture Capital joined as a new investor. As part of the deal, Erik Thoresen, a partner at BOKA Capital, will join Ocient’s board of directors, and Teresa Smetzer, an operating partner at BOKA, will serve as a board observer. CEA International, the London-based subsidiary of CEA Group, acted as Ocient’s UK financing advisor and helped secure BOKA’s participation as co-lead.

“Turning advanced technology into dependable operational capability is now the critical test across defense and national security,” said John James, CEO of BOKA Capital. “Ocient’s architecture, and its record managing complex data environments at scale, put it in a strong position to meet that test.”

“We first invested in Ocient because we believed in the team’s ability to tackle problems that others had largely left unsolved,” said Jim Dugan, founding managing partner of OCA Ventures. “The advancements Ocient has made since then reinforce that early conviction.”

What OcientAIQ Does

OcientAIQ is Ocient’s platform for running analytics and agentic AI directly on governed, petabyte-scale data. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, a scale reached by the call records telecom carriers generate nonstop and the logs security systems accumulate. The OcientAIQ Unified Data Platform combines data ingestion, analytics, governance and agent orchestration in a single engine, so AI agents can work on complete datasets without sampling.

The company says the design matters for trust. Because analysis runs inside the engine rather than through a language model, every result can be reproduced and audited, with minimal data movement and lower token cost. Governance controls enforce access, policy and lineage rules on agent activity, which Ocient presents as the difference between an AI demo and a system a regulated organization can rely on.

OcientAIQ Solutions package the platform for specific industries. The company names three use cases: cybersecurity, where teams ingest network and security data as fast as it is generated and trace where an indicator has appeared across the complete history; compliance, where communications providers retrieve every required call detail record and internet connection record for the full mandated retention window; and tailored data engines, where enterprises, service providers and government agencies build their own AI-ready data engine in their own environment.

The Round in Numbers: $100M Series C, $260M total raised, 3x revenue growth

Source: company announcements | Graphic: GPTOnline

Growth Behind the Round

Ocient, founded in 2016 in Chicago by Chris Gladwin with Joe Jablonski and George Kondiles, has built its business on customers whose datasets keep growing. Gladwin previously founded Cleversafe, the object storage business later acquired by IBM. According to SiliconANGLE, chief executive John Morris said much of the recent growth is coming from new customers in national security and telecommunications, particularly organizations consolidating their cybersecurity data on the platform.

The company also said it has continued to expand its strategic partner network and, earlier this year, formalized both its India operations and Ocient National Security Solutions as dedicated subsidiaries. No valuation was disclosed for the round, and the revenue figures are the company’s own claims, not independently verified results.

Where OcientAIQ Works: Cybersecurity, Compliance, Tailored data engine

Source: Ocient press release, November 5, 2026 | Graphic: GPTOnline

Why It Matters

The funding lands as enterprises move from AI experiments to production systems that must answer questions over their largest datasets. Ocient’s announcement cites Gartner’s forecast that worldwide IT spending will reach $7.35 trillion in 2027, up 15% from 2026, as organizations work to industrialize AI. At that scale, the company argues, governance is what turns AI spending into trusted outcomes.

The round also reflects where investor money in AI infrastructure is going. Rather than funding another model, BOKA and OCA backed the layer underneath: the governed data engine that agents query. If agentic AI keeps expanding inside large organizations, the bottleneck shifts from generating answers to trusting them, and that is the gap Ocient is raising money to fill.

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