Cambridge Semantics

About Cambridge Semantics

Cambridge Semantics offers a modern data management and analytics software platform, recently brought into the Altair portfolio through an acquisition announced in April 2024. The company was established in 2007 by a team of innovators from IBM's Advanced Technology Internet Group, including Sean Martin, Lee Feigenbaum, Simon Martin, Emmett Eldred, and Ben Szekely. This group shared a vision for leveraging semantic graph data models to transform how organizations analyze their data. The founders' background at IBM, particularly within advanced internet technology and data modeling, provided a strong foundation for the company's direction.

The company's core business revolves around its Anzo platform, which facilitates the creation of enterprise-scale knowledge graphs. This technology addresses the challenge of data silos by integrating diverse structured and unstructured data into a unified, accessible view. The business model targets large enterprises across various sectors, including Life Sciences, Financial Services, Government, and Manufacturing. Clients like Merck, Novartis, and Credit Suisse have used the platform to accelerate data integration and generate new insights. Revenue is generated through the sale of its software platform and related solutions.

The primary offering, the Anzo platform, is a comprehensive knowledge graph system built on its high-performance graph Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) engine, AnzoGraph. Anzo allows users to ingest data from multiple sources—such as relational databases, flat files, documents, and emails—and transform it into a connected graph. A key feature is its use of open W3C semantic web standards like RDF and SPARQL, which helps future-proof data models. The platform is designed to handle massive data volumes, with AnzoGraph operating as a massively parallel processing (MPP) in-memory database. This architecture enables high-speed, interactive analytics, data harmonization, and support for generative AI applications by providing essential business context. Following the acquisition, Altair is integrating these technologies into its Altair RapidMiner platform, combining them with existing data science, machine learning, and business intelligence tools.