Ocient Raises 100 Million Dollars for AI on Petabyte Data as Cerabyte Ceramic Storage Passes S3 Tests at CERN
Three infrastructure announcements on November 5 sit at different layers of the same stack. A funding round for querying huge datasets with AI agents, a networking deal for a new inference cloud, and a storage test at CERN for keeping data for decades.
Ocient: 100 million dollars and revenue set to triple
Ocient, a Chicago data analytics company, raised a $100 million Series C co-led by BOKA Capital and OCA Ventures. Returning investors include Greycroft, In-Q-Tel, Blue Bear Capital, Buoyant Ventures, PSP Growth and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. Total funding is now $260 million. No valuation was given.
The product is OcientAIQ, a platform that lets AI agents and analysts query petabyte-scale data. It combines ingestion, analytics, governance and agent orchestration, and protects data with forward error correction instead of keeping full replicas. At petabyte scale that saves a lot of disk.
The customer base is the interesting part. Growth comes mainly from national security agencies and telecom operators, especially ones consolidating cybersecurity data and call and connection records they have to keep for compliance. In-Q-Tel on the cap table fits that. Ocient set up a national security subsidiary this year, along with a separate India operation. Revenue doubled last year and the company expects it to more than triple in the fiscal year ending in January. CEO John Morris says the money goes to delivery staff, sales and expansion into Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Breakeven is a goal, with no date attached.
Ocient’s pitch against Snowflake and Databricks is that it often runs alongside them. It sells to customers whose data is too large or too sensitive to send to a shared cloud warehouse.
Meridian Cloud picks Aria for its inference network
Meridian Cloud, a planned inference-only cloud targeting launch in the second quarter of 2027, chose Aria Networks to design and supply its cluster networking. Aria covers the back-end GPU fabric, front-end and storage networks, topology and cabling, and coordinates supply and delivery.
The hardware is the Aria Switch, 64 ports of 800 Gigabit Ethernet in two rack units with RoCEv2 and a dedicated telemetry processor. Aria claims telemetry 100 to 10,000 times finer than conventional tools. That’s a claim about visibility. It says nothing about speed. The design is a standards-based Ethernet fabric, so it stays open to accelerators from different vendors. First joint reference designs are due in the second quarter of 2027. Neither company gave cluster sizes, GPU counts or locations.
Meridian runs a small central team and buys engineering from specialist partners. Aria’s forward deployed engineers have worked inside Meridian’s team from the start, CEO Vic Rose says, which is how a small cloud gets a network team without hiring one.
Cerabyte writes CERN data to ceramic
Cerabyte, which writes data with lasers onto ceramic-coated glass, completed S3 integration testing with CERN openlab. Applications wrote, stored and read back data using standard S3 commands, with no change to their workflows. CERN’s tape archive manager, Vladimir Bahyl, said the lab wrote a cross-section of its material: a book and articles on six decades of discoveries, video of the 2012 Higgs announcement, sample CMS physics data with Higgs candidate events, and annual reports. He called the results encouraging and said evaluation continues.
The pitch is cold storage that needs no power to keep data and no migration every few years, the cost that makes tape archives expensive to run over decades. S3 compatibility matters because archive software already speaks it. Cerabyte gave no density, speed or price figures, and those will decide whether ceramic replaces any tape at all.
For IT teams, the Ocient revenue line is the number worth keeping. A tripling in one year from government and telecom buyers says agent queries on huge internal datasets are already being paid for.