Friday, 23 June 2023, Bengaluru, India
Companies need help to get significant value from their stored data due to the expansion of diverse data types. Data teams are overworked because they must simultaneously meet the needs of several departments within a business while attempting to uphold consistent data policies.
Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish, the co-founders of Acryl Data, a firm that offers solutions to help companies organize and ostensibly better manage their data, at least share that belief. In a Series A round-headed by 8VC and including Sherpalo Ventures and Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel, Acryl reported today that it had raised an additional $21 million, bringing its total funding to $30 million.
Das worked as a lead staff software engineer at LinkedIn before founding Acryl Data. Before that, he was a part of the technical teams at PayPal and Yahoo! (full disclosure: Das owns TechCrunch). Through LinkedIn, Yahoo, Airbnb, and more, Jagadish found Acryl.
The CEO, Jagadish, described Acryl Data as “a community-driven metadata platform that delivers central controls across the decentralized data stack” in an email interview with TechCrunch. “With a mission to bring clarity to data, Acryl offers a data catalog with solutions for data discovery, governance, lineage, and observability.”
Data catalogs are widely available; to name a few, startups Castor, Stemma, Select Star, and Alation, all offer them. But Jagadish contends that Acryl’s strategy has several significant advantages over competitors.
The platform developed by Acryl, which is based on the open-source framework DataHub, is one of them since it uses “event-driven” information. According to Jagadish, Acryl can lower the cost of data catalog upkeep while enabling a variety of trigger-based workflows by only carrying out activities when triggered.
Customers can use Acryl to execute metadata analyses that reveal opportunities for cost optimization, such as pricey or underutilized data assets. Users can establish and continually analyze a set of conditions on the data assets in an organization using the adjustable monitors powering these tests.
The status quo of custom development is “our most frequent ‘competitor,'” according to Jagadish, “as data engineers establish manual processes and protocols on their own rather than implement a more automated solution.”
Acryl has big aspirations for the future, including AI tools that would “intelligently curate” metadata and offer phrases and tags from corporate dictionaries to describe data catalogs better. The business also plans to introduce an AI-powered tool to summarize a specific data catalog’s significant features, such as its dependability and utility.
Acryl, which employs 25 people, only reveals a little about its clientele. However, the startup mentions some of its clients, including Notion, Zendesk, Robinhood, OVO Energy, BetterUp, and Riskified.
Das noted that organizations like Pinterest, Stripe, Optum, Expedia, Saxo Bank, and Peloton use DataHub, which he built while working at LinkedIn and which Acryl’s crew maintains. He hopes that at least a few of those will convert because of the services Acryl is adding to DataHub.
“The fast rate of change in the data ecosystem presents a challenge for businesses and vendors alike,” said Jagadish.
Acryl boosts productivity for data teams as problems inevitability develop. Data specialists can leverage Acryl’s lineage and impact analysis features to shorten the time it takes to resolve data issues significantly. At the same time, business users have a shared resource to ask and answer questions instead of developing ad hoc procedures for each case.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
