Secoda, a startup that wants to make digging out hidden company data easy, nailed $2.75 million CAD in a seed round led by Craft Ventures.
Golden Ventures, GFC, Soma Capital, Union Capital, Garage Capital, and YCombinator participated in Secoda’s seed round that closed at the end of October.
An explosion of data in the last few years makes it difficult for companies to track and understand their own data, according to Secoda, which claims only 12 percent of data companies collect is ever used. Secoda offers an interface that allows users to quickly find data squirreled away in company databases.
“Our value is we’re able to do all the extraction, all of the magic, in five minutes.”
In fact, the startup’s name, Secoda, stands for searchable company data, according to co-founder Etai Mizrahi, who noted that most companies possess a great deal of undocumented and difficult-to-find data.
“We’re building a Google[-like] search for company data,” Mizrahi said.
Mizrahi gives the example of trying to locate a single table within a data warehouse. “You can imagine there’s hundreds of rows with thousands of columns,” he said. Secoda’s integration connects to where the data is stored, and queries the database for the metadata related to the information it’s trying to locate.
The SaaS startup plans to use the funds to add more staff, as well as more features to its product.
Secoda anticipates adding roughly 10 new employees in product, engineering, and marketing over the first half of 2022. Currently, the startup has five employees. Some of the features Secoda is looking at adding to its solution include an open API, further integrations, and enabling more collaboration.
The startup’s solution allows software engineers and others to see the table description, who created it, when it was created, and add documentation so the next person can find the table, and understand its data.
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A graduate of YCombinator’s summer 2021 cohort, Secoda attracted investment from Craft Ventures because of the latter’s interest in “bottom-up SaaS” firms that blend product-led growth with B2B sales. David Sacks, co-founder of Craft Ventures, in his company bio said bottom-up Saas companies combine the growth potential of B2C with the enterprise budgets of B2B, “leading to explosive outcomes when ARR [annual recurring revenue] goes viral.”
According to Mizrahi, Craft Ventures funded Secoda because the startup is “taking this unique bottom-up SaaS approach to a space that’s traditionally been enterprise-focused.” Sacks pioneered the bottom-up SaaS strategy at the enterprise collaboration company he founded, Yammer, that Microsoft ultimately acquired for $1.2 billion USD.
Ethan Ruby, VP of analytics at Craft Ventures, declared: “Companies today are generating so much data that it’s nearly impossible to organize, preventing them from actually using their data to provide insights. We’ve seen this problem across dozens of our portfolio companies, but had never seen an elegant way of solving it before we met Etai and Andrew [McEwen, Secoda’s co-founder].”
“This was because there was very little documentation and process around managing data knowledge.”
Certainly, Secoda finds itself in good company at Craft Ventures. The VC has invested in, among others, Airbnb, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Slack, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Uber, and Hootsuite.
Over 100 data teams in “basically every continent” have been using Secoda’s product since the startup launched in May. Mizrahi said many solutions in the markets can take up to two months to set up. “Our value is we’re able to do all the extraction, all of the magic, in five minutes,” he said. “That’s allowed us to grow pretty fast and get adapted by a good amount of data teams.”
Mizrahi and McEwen sold their last company – video conferencing startup Correly, which helps improve sales conversions for SaaS business – to the edtech startup Acadium in 2019, while still studying in university.
But after joining Acadium, a firm Mizrahi described as a fast-growing startup with lots of data – Mizrahi and McEwen found it difficult to find and use data within the firm.
“This was because there was very little documentation and process around managing data knowledge,” Mizrahi explained. “Not having this context and ability to use company data slowed us down significantly. We would often wait four weeks to get answers to simple questions like what was our revenue last month, or what does this table mean?”
Frustrated with their inability to locate data, Mizrahi and McEwen founded Secoda.
Secoda’s customers range from small startups to large corporations such as Panasonic, who subscribe to use the product.
Some similar enterprise tools exist for massive companies, according to Mizrahi. But he noted that Secoda is largely pursuing smaller, fast-growing data teams at startups that are quick and nimble. Mizrahi claimed Secoda has taken a “modern approach” to its solution, describing it as “easy to use” so that startups can begin deploying it immediately.
Secoda’s current challenge? Keeping up with customer demand for new features, Mizrahi said. Up until early October, he and McEwen bootstrapped the company. “We’ve hired a few people now to keep up with all the demand, but to keep up I think we’re going to bring on some good people,” he said.
Featured image from Seconda