Belgium-based Soda raises €11.5M to keep your data fit for purpose, verifiable and trustworthy; here’s how

Bad data is bad business. According to a survey by Gartner, the average financial impact of bad data on organisations in 2017 was estimated to be around $15M (approx €12.4M) per year. Bad data is an inaccurate set of information, including missing data, wrong information, inappropriate data, non-conforming data, duplicate data and poor entries (misspells, typos, variations in spellings, format etc).

The financial impact of bad data is so significant because people across any business are all exposed to data, and use it as part of their roles every day. If data is incomplete or damaged, the time taken to correct the data is both time-consuming and costly. This is where Belgium-based Soda.io wants to help out.

Soda.io raises Series A round

The Brussels-based startup is on a mission to bring everyone closer to the data. It has raised €11.5M in its Series A round of funding led by European venture investor Singular Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investors including seed investors Point Nine Capital, Hummingbird Ventures, DCF, and angel investors.

This latest funding, and the €2.6M it raised in its Seed round led by Point Nine Capital, brings the startup’s total funding to over €14M. In 2018, Soda won €500K as part of an Innovative Starters Award from Innoviris, the Brussels regional institute for Research and Innovation.

Use of the funds

Speaking on the development, Raffi Kamber, General Partner at Singular Ventures says, “Analysis and usage of data has become business-critical in most applications. Data quality needs to be preserved everywhere in a modern data stack, which is becoming increasingly massive and complex. A natural need has thus emerged for a platform that monitors data and provides a unified view of the data and its issues to all the stakeholders.”

The raised capital will help the company to accelerate the development of its data monitoring platform that streamlines how teams find the data worth fixing as well as establish its global reach.

What services does Soda.io provide?

Soda is a data monitoring platform that keeps data fit for purpose, verifiable, and trustworthy by connecting data engineers, operations, and businesses to collaborate and work with trusted data. The company uncovers data issues, alerts the right teams, and triggers resolution workflows to identify causes that obstruct data quality.

“The testing and monitoring of software and infrastructure is ubiquitous, so why don’t we apply the same principles to data, arguably any business’ most important strategic asset? “The world’s fastest-growing companies rely on data in online retail, financial markets and even vaccine discovery, and in every instance the quality and integrity of the data is paramount,” explains Tom Baeyens, CTO & Co-founder, Soda.

The platform’s interface enables users to instrument multiple datasets across any data workload to create observability so that anyone in the organisation can collaborate on data monitoring. This means businesses can adapt quickly to change, swiftly deploy new technologies and build new products on solid data foundations.

Soda.io’s backstory

The company was founded in 2018 by Maarten Masschelein and Tom Baeyens. According to the duo, Soda is a data monitoring platform that allows teams to define what good data looks like, and resolve issues swiftly before they have a downstream impact. This transparency and ease create trust – in each other, and in the data.

“Companies like Amazon, Tesla and Deliveroo have shown that you can disrupt entire markets at scale with data. Businesses are moving from using data to being built entirely on data, but there are challenges in terms of how they collect, process and maintain this data. You need to test and monitor data to stay on top of it but most companies don’t have the capabilities and engineering resources to do this,” says Maarten Masschelein.

He also added, “We have seen a huge surge in demand for our data monitoring platform from the most innovative digital companies who are looking to address these challenges, and this round of funding allows us to start commercially meeting this need. Soda is leading the way to a future where companies all over the world can build and rely on data of the highest quality.”