Today (Tuesday), Israeli startup Databand.ai, a DevOps observability tool that predicts data faults, announced a $14.5 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Accel, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, F2 Capital, Differential Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau.
The platform that calls out your data’s issues
Databand.ai was founded by data engineers, who note that they have felt the damage that faulty data processes can cause first hand. And while the whole data shtik has been accelerated in recent years, leading to every company having data analysis and processing teams, Databand decided to develop a critical tool for DevOps teams - a platform that reveals and predicts problems in the data pipeline. The platform works in the shadows of the data pipeline monitoring, collecting, and learning an organization’s data processes to find and predict data problems, even before developers realize that there is an issue at all.
The platform floods issues when they occur, pinpoints the problem, and that way saves valuable time and prevents technological issues from running rampant all over your pipeline.
Databand CPO and co-founder Victor Shafran explains in a conversation with Geektime that the product was developed out of a personal pain: “I’ve worked for enterprises, where data is the engine. This led to me working alongside data engineers, which exposed me to the fact that they mostly spend their days “putting out fires”, instead of advancing data capabilities to push the company forward. I realized that the engineers were mostly responding to problems rather than actively preventing them.”
According to Shafran. Databand’s platform is a first-of-its-kind: “Our uniqueness stems from the fact that we collect data from an organization’s entire data pipeline, using it to form a comprehensive picture of the whole status of the data, in addition to offering remediation recommendations in real-time.”
Shafran adds that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic played straight into Databand’s hands: “COVID reality has significantly exposed faults in the organizational pipeline. Before, the data engineer would be flagged on a certain issue, but now with everyone working remote, critical problem solving becomes delayed. Thus, creating an immediate need for automated data monitoring tools.”
He also notes that because organizations can easily implement the company’s platform remotely, it really helped market the solution to new customers. Following Databand’s stellar growth spurt, Sharan tells that the company decided to accelerate fundraising efforts - and found some of the top VCs to get behind them.
Tel Aviv-based Databand was founded in 2018 by Shafran, CEO Josh Benamram, and CTO Evgeny Shulman. The newly acquired funds will go towards further development of the platform, expanding the company and its product offering (including a free code library).
