CluedIn raises $15M to grow its data prep and analytics platform

Data management startup CluedIn today announced the closure of a $15 million series A funding round led by Dawn Capital, which brings its total raised to over $16 million. The company says that the proceeds will be used to build out its platform, expand its sales and marketing team, and drive partnerships and expansion, particularly in the U.S.

Most enterprises have to wrangle countless data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020. That’s perhaps why the corporate sector has taken an interest in solutions that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources. Gartner says that data integration and preparation are among the top three technologies organizations seek to automate by the end of 2022.

Copenhagen-based CluedIn, which was founded in 2015 by former Sitecore engineers Tim Ward, Pierre Derval, and Martin Hyldahl, aims to streamline the process of making data ready for insights. The company leverages a graph database that sits between data sources and applications, offering solutions for data integration, governance, and management.

CluedIn integrates with existing systems and delivers a view of what data needs fixing at the global, source, entity, and property level. Data arbitration is built into the platform — CluedIn automatically reconciles records like addresses, company names, and more via reconfigurable rules. CluedIn’s data prep engine removes duplicate entries from databases, leveraging AI and machine learning for metadata management system.

Data prep benefits

According to a Forbes survey, data scientists spend 80% of their time on data preparation, and 76% view it as the least enjoyable part of their work. It’s also expensive. Trifacta pegs the collective data prep cost for organizations at $450 billion.

Beyond time and cost savings, CluedIn says that its platform, which can share data with third-party applications, enables enterprises to meet core regulatory and compliance requirements. For example, CluedIn can track data lineage and mask any personally identifiable information that it encounters. It also features templates for retention policies designed to help customers align with business- and government-level compliance rules.

Thirty-employee CluedIn has customers in a range of verticals including Nordea, SAP, and Ticketmaster. For Pfizer and Coca-Cola, it’s providing customer insights analytics, according to Ward.

“For some sectors, for example retail and consumer industries, the shift to online sales channels during the pandemic added urgency to the need to know the customer and sales patterns through data,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “In terms of master data management use cases, the top vendors in the space are the likes of Informatica, SAP and IBM, however the disruptive nature and unique approach of CluedIn’s product mean it offers a very different experience for the end user than these providers.”

In addition to Dawn Capital, Collibra cofounder Stijn Christiaens and existing investor Nordic Makers participated in CluedIn’s latest funding round.