Workday Ventures, the investment arm of the financial management giant, Workday, has led a $12 million strategic funding round for collaborative data startup data.world.
The Associated Press and OurCrowd also contributed to the round, bringing the Austin startup's total funding to $45.3 million since its 2016 launch. But this round may have as much to do with the connections Workday provides as it does with the money, which will help data.world hire salespeople, data librarians and engineers.
That's because Workday, a company with a $31 billion market cap, will be walking data.world's team into meetings with Fortune 500 companies that want to create a data-driven culture within their massive ecosystems, co-founder and CEO Brett Hurt told Austin Inno.
"Literally, they’re saying who do you want to meet in our client base," he said. “These are really amazing executives putting their belief in us and marketing us to their largest clients.”
Hurt, who previously founded and exited Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics, said that, like his previous ventures, data.world is timed with the market to empower the latest generation of tech executives -- in this case, data scientists who are tasked making analysis part of almost every aspect of traditional, enterprise-scale businesses.
With that in mind, data.world has integrated with Slack, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Excel, Google Data Studio and 30-plus other programs.
“When you’re working with enterprises and your charter is to help them become data driven cultures… you need to be integrated into all those tools," Hurt said. "Decentralization is the norm.”
While companies like Warby Parker and Airbnb were built with data analysis at their core, Hurt said many older enterprise companies have a years-long path to building data analytics into their cultures.
“It matters because these companies are communities, they’re just bound by title, compensation and mission statement," he said. "But they are communities and we spend most of our waking time at work.”
That's why much of the new funding is targeted at a new "smart catalog for data analysis" that puts customized data and specific project information in front of relevant users within a business. That data can then be analyzed along with other big datasets from the Census Bureau or other organizations.
While data.world has put an emphasis on winning over Fortune 500 clients, the startup is also staying true to its Public Benefit Corporation mission.
The startup's public benefit is perhaps most visible through its partnership with The Associated Press, which has used data.world's platform to organize big data sets used in investigative reporting projects that can be shared across the AP's global network of reporters and then localized by individual reporters in a given market.
The AP apparently sees a lot of value in the platform, as it has also invested in data.world's new $12 million round.
"AP was born back in 1846 as a cooperative of newspaper publishers sharing access to a fast horse to get news updates from the war in Mexico," Jim Kennedy, the news agency's senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development, said in a news release. "The data.world platform is like that fast horse, enabling us to open important new territory for newsgathering in the 21st century. It has given us the ability to collaborate with our customers to tell stories from data on an unprecedented scale."
Hurt noted that data.world has been used by reporters to investigate the opioid crisis, the nation's dwindling housing inventory, climate change and many other public safety issues.
“The fact that we’ve been able to help during such an important time in the history of news… that just makes me really proud and it’s such a validation to have one of our customers invest in us," he said.
