The investment floodgates opened for the analytics world last week and unleashed a torrent of funding announcements bigger than anything the industry has seen in quite some time. One of the first startups in line was France’s Shift Technology, which closed a $10 million round led by Accel to finance the development of new features for its artificial intelligence service.

The cloud-based system promises to help insurance companies identify fraudulent claims faster by automating the most time-consuming aspects of the investigation process. Built-in machine learning algorithms can analyze the available information about the parties involved for common red flags and highlights cases that warrant user attention. Shift says that its service is then able to point out exactly what parts of an incident are in need of examination, as well as produce an assessment about the nature of the suspected issue.

It’s an approach that is also being applied to infrastructure monitoring by startups like BigPanda Inc. which raised $5 million in funding of its own last week. The cash infusion comes as an extension to a Series B round originally announced last October that now totals at $21 million. The outfit will spend the capital on broadening the adoption of its Alert Correlation Platform, a managed monitoring service that is already used by top brands such as News Corp. and Gap Inc. to keep track of their systems.

In addition to BigPanda and Shift Technology, SAP too managed to make headlines in the analytics world last week after it unveiled a homegrown data-as-a-service offering. Marketers can now buy audience information from the vendor in the form of $439 “data files” that contain granular demographic and location statistics, as well as related details like their  customers’ mobile usage habits. 

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