Belgian data quality startup Soda has received $14 million to expand in North America.
The firm, founded in 2018 by CEO Maarten Masschelein and CTO Tom Baeyens, develops software and cloud services that continuously monitor and validate data. This enables users to detect, understand, and fix data quality issues such as missing, duplicated, misaligned, inaccurate, incorrect, or outdated items that could generate incorrect results from downstream apps processing the data. It provides visual dashboards to monitor data quality and alerts for critical items. Both Masschelein and Baeyens are KU Leuven alumni.
Masschelein said: “Over the past 12 months, Soda has charted a course to self-sustainability which has been reliant on a world-class team, valued and active support from a global community of users, and an unwavering vision to democratize data quality.”
Soda claims it has hundreds of customers around the world including Disney, HelloFresh, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bloomberg.
The period since the start of 2023 has provided difficulties, according to Masschelein. “It’s been a challenging year for a lot of tech companies, which is why we are proud to have firstly achieved self-sustainability, kept our team intact, and now welcome additional funding support which gives us the strongest possible platform to capitalize on the huge investment in AI which has highlighted the critical value of data quality.”
Over this period Soda has “made significant investments in becoming a GenAI-first platform.” It thinks GenAI has the potential to transform the data testing and observability industry, and claims to have been the first to introduce GenAI in the data quality space with the release of SodaGPT in 2023 – a tool for data quality testing. It recently announced Soda AI – a data quality tool suite designed to increase productivity. This includes SodaGPT, Anomaly Detection, and new OpenAI-powered Assistants.
Soda claims it has also “pioneered the creation and adoption of data contracts” in this period. These “make it easier for data teams to manage the data they publish as an API, just like they would in software engineering.” The next step for the Soda platform will focus on integrating AI into the workflow of data engineers – to suggest and automate testing and observability for the data layer.
Soda said it plans to use the additional investment to further augment its global team – significantly expanding its New York City headquarters with experienced go-to-market talent to continue its growth in North America.
The invested cash came from strategic partners and existing investors including Singular and Point Nine.
