Organizations working with large amounts of data often struggle to ensure that data remains high quality. According to a research from Great Expectations, which creates open source data testing tools, 77% of companies have data quality problems and 91% believe that this affects their performance.
With this in mind, unsurprisingly, business has been healthy for vendors that sell data visualization services and software, which help organizations understand the health and condition of their data. Last year, within one week, only three companies in the data center – Cribl, Montecarlo and Coralogix – earned more than $400 million.
In an indication that the market isn’t over yet, another data-driven start-up earns this week’s buys: The whistle. Today the company announced that it has raised €12 million (~$12.7 million) in a Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures with participation from previous investors.
Sifflet was founded in June 2021 by Salma Bakouk, a former Goldman Sachs VP in the sales and marketing department. He teamed up with software engineers Wissem Fathallah (formerly of Uber and Amazon) and Wajdi Fathallah to launch MVP, which grew into a popular data visualization tool.
“Sifflet is a data visualization platform that aims to help businesses gain confidence in their data,” Bakouk told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Its platform sits on top of the data stack, providing 360-degree data management.”
Using Sifflet, companies can collect information in different parts of their products, from data entry stages to changes and usage. The platform automatically monitors data, metadata and data pipelines to ensure that something could go wrong, such as a sudden drop in quality.
Sifflet maintains a row to make it easier for data engineers to analyze root causes. As Bakouk explains, AI is key to this.
“AI is used in our analysis engines, data classification and product optimization,” he said. “Our models are pre-trained based on different types of data from different industries and systems and are regularly re-trained after deployment to better reflect customer experience and minimize any bias.”
So, given the competition in the data visualization space, can Sifflet compete fairly? His salespeople clearly believe he can. An additional measure is the size of Sifflet’s customer base, but Bakouk did not disclose this. He admitted, however, that Sifflet counts brands like Carrefour, Nextbite and ShopBack among its recent clients.
“The Sifflet process is specifically designed to be inclusive of a wide range of experts, both technical and non-technical,” Bakouk said. “In the current financial environment, where companies are faced with difficult decisions, data-driven decision-making is the norm and the trend is not tolerated.”
It’s hard to argue with that last point. According to Gartner, data insufficiency financial institutions approximately $12.9 million annually. In addition, data engineers spend two days a week eradicating bad data, a research from Monte Carlo found.
“Economy is very effective in adopting data. Companies need to remove uncertainty from the equation when making difficult decisions and the reliability of data is important,” said Bakouk. “As a company, we consider operating costs to be very important and we look for ways to improve. The fact that we had a laser-sharp vision from day one allowed us to be stable and quick in execution and avoid costly pivots.”
Paris-based Sifflet, which has raised €15 million (~$15.85 million) to date, plans to expand its sales operations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and the US and continue to sell products and engineering. It currently has 28 employees and aims to double this number by the end of the year.