Estonia’s Alvin bags €6.1M from Project A Ventures, others for its data lineage platform

Tallinn-based Alvin, a data lineage platform, announced on Wednesday that it has secured $6M (approximately €6.1M) in a Seed round of funding led by Project A Ventures.

Other participating investors include Icebreaker.vc, Nomad Capital, and angel investors Chris Shagen (former CMO of Contentful), Nick Handel (CEO and co-founder of Transform), and Ragnar Sass (co-founder of Pipedrive). 

Alvin says the capital will be used to expand the engineering team to deliver on its roadmap and execute its go-to-market strategy.

Besides funding, the Estonian company also announced the launch of its platform after a successful beta phase, offering a toolkit to test code, trace errors, and identify inefficiencies.

Alvin: What you need to know

Dan Mashiter and Martin Sahlen founded Alvin in 2018, believing that companies no longer compete on how much data they collect and store but on its quality and how they leverage it. The company’s mission is to enable teams of all sizes to improve the quality and usability of their data. 

“Businesses are rightly shifting focus from how much data they collect and store to its quality, availability, usability, and ROI,” says Mashiter. 

Alvin has built a plug-and-play SaaS platform that offers data teams a toolkit to help them improve the quality of their data and lower costs. The platform automatically enables data teams to map their entire data architecture and how data is connected, transformed, and consumed. 

Alvin’s core technology automatically builds and maintains a highly accurate graph dataset representing the connections between columns, tables, dashboards, SaaS platforms, and people.

“By automatically mapping data flows within and across systems and how it is consumed throughout the business, Alvin is building the operating system for the modern data stack. Alvin gives data teams the tools to measure and improve the key metrics they will now be judged on and ultimately maximise their impact,” adds Mashiter.

The platform enables teams to detect and trace pipeline errors/bugs using the dataset, reducing data downtime. It also automates regression testing, providing a detailed report of downstream impact before code deployment.

Additionally, it optimises cost by identifying unused assets and pipelines, and safely removing them.

Alvin claims it organically grew its beta waitlist to 400+ companies and has already secured its first commercial contracts, including Fintech Quanto.

Project A: What you need to know

Project A is a European venture capital company with offices in Berlin, Munich, and London. 

In addition to $600M in assets under management, Project A supports its portfolio companies with a team of over 110 in-house experts in themes such as software and product development, business intelligence, brand, design, marketing, CRM, sales, venture development, or recruiting.

Uwe Horstmann, General Partner Project A, says, “Alvin is going to make the lives of everyone handling big data much easier. Martin and Dan have a proven track record in data-driven companies, and they have built a great system to help companies trace, analyse and govern data more effectively.”