Toronto startup Masthead Data, which offers a data observability platform, has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding.
California-based venture capital firm Focal led the round with participation from SMOK Ventures, DEPO Ventures, Monochrome, and Alchemist Accelerator.
Masthead said former Uber and Google employees, angel investors from Snowflake, and privacy and security professionals contributed, though their names were not disclosed.
Masthead claims users only need logs and metadata to see what’s happening in their entire data warehouse.
Data observability refers to organizations’ process of understanding the health and performance of the data within their systems. It requires collecting massive amounts of data from different networks and applications, which can be difficult for data engineering teams.
“Achieving data observability is a huge challenge for data engineering teams when they have thousands of tables in their warehouse,” said Yuliia Tkachova, co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data.
Tkachova, who founded the company with Sergey Tkachov in 2022, said the idea for creating Masthead comes from her frustrations with data reliability in her career as a product manager at a business-intelligence startup. She added that customers often complained because they didn’t trust the data provided by the company’s product.
A statement by Masthead noted that current approaches to data observability typically require access to client data while also contributing to computing costs.
What makes Masthead’s data observability platform different, according to the company, is that it doesn’t require access to client data, ensuring that their information is untouched and private. It also claims it doesn’t contribute to a client’s cloud computing cost, and can be deployed within minutes.
Masthead said that its solution would only need to ingest logs and metadata to see what’s happening in an entire data warehouse, allowing it to identify data anomalies and pipeline errors in real-time.
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According to Masthead, its platform is already being used by organizations in e-commerce, finance, and other technology domains. This includes Yalo, which offers tools for businesses to use messaging apps as part of their customer engagement strategies.
Joseph Arriola, former senior data manager at Yalo, said in a Masthead press release that before using Masthead, his team would spend hours troubleshooting data problems.
“Masthead gives us a single pane of glass to see potential data anomalies. Everyone on the team can instantly see where a problem is coming from and how it’s affecting our work and our stakeholders,” Arriola said.
Masthead is currently available for Google Cloud, with plans to roll out to other providers in the coming months.
Featured image courtesy Masthead Data.
