Snowflake leads $62.9M investment in Cybersyn, a data-as-a-service provider

Cybersyn, a New York-based company offering data-as-a-service (DaaS) for enterprises, today emerged from stealth with $62.9 million in series A funding. Cybersyn aims to make public and proprietary economic data more accessible and useful for decision-makers across various sectors.

Enterprises are increasingly turning toward data science to drive efficiencies, but this cannot be done solely on the basis of internal data. This is where Cybersyn steps in, providing teams with standardized third-party data to work with.

What makes Cybersyn’s DaaS unique?

While there’s an abundance of external datasets to loop into business models, certain challenges affect their deployment. 

First, one has to give a lot of effort to find datasets related to a specific domain. Then, if they figure out where to buy the required data, teams have to put in significant engineering efforts to make the information usable. Without engineering, the information remains largely complex, stagnant and opaque — meaning difficult to use. 

Cybersyn, founded in 2022 by Coatue’s former head of data science Alex Izydorczyk, solves this challenge with a specific focus on economic data. The company finds and transforms public and proprietary economic data into commercially relevant datasets that are useful for decision-makers across businesses and governments. It helps with market intelligence, investments and policy decisions, among other things.

Izydorczyk started working with external data during his stint with Coatue and later transformed the work into a dedicated company providing data assets on the Snowflake marketplace.

“Cybersyn has already launched a series of public data listings, available at no cost on the Snowflake marketplace, focused on distributing government data on consumer spending, inflation, and interest rates in a consistent format. And now, we are launching our e-commerce benchmarks, focused on measuring ad spending and online sales by category,” the founder said in a blog post.

With this round of funding from Snowflake and others, the DaaS company will grow its team of data engineers and researchers in New York and focus on acquiring more proprietary datasets to create derived products for enterprises. 

“In the future, we expect to launch datasets focused on consumer spending in the United States, with a particular focus on digital transactions at greater frequencies and granularity than publicly available. These datasets will help investors, advertisers, and retailers measure their competitors,” Izydorczyk noted in the blog post.

Snowflake gets a stronger marketplace offering

The funding round was led by data cloud provider Snowflake with participation from Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital. The investment, which has come directly from Snowflake’s corporate site and not its venture capital arm, will see company executives Mike Scarpelli and Christian Kleinerman, as well as Thomas Laffont, cofounder of Coatue, joining Cybersyn’s board.

From the perspective of the Snowflake data platform, which already offers multiple sources to enrich data on its marketplace, the investment will help the company provide stronger financial data products to its customer base. 

“Our partnership with Cybersyn will enable us to deliver even more valuable content to our customers on Snowflake Marketplace,” Kleinerman said. 

“Data needs are constantly evolving and Cybersyn has demonstrated a willingness and ability to move quickly. Cybersyn leverages the native security and governance of Snowflake’s platform to quickly and securely combine data from multiple sources to create derivative products. Cybersyn customers can then combine these data products with their own data to better understand what’s happening in their markets and the economy around them,” he told VentureBeat.

Along with Cybersyn, Snowflake marketplace features financial and economic data products from DaaS companies like Exchange Data International, Knoema, Stripe, SimilarWeb, People Data Labs, FactSet and CoreLogic.