After launching digital health, fintech companies, this founder is building his third startup in Baltimore

Serial entrepreneur Gorkem Sevinc has faced a common frustration in the several ventures he has helped to build in Baltimore — bad data. It's a problem he is now hoping to fix with his latest startup.

These days, companies of all sizes and types are using data to drive decisions about everything from sales and marketing tactics to employee performance. But plenty of factors can cause a company to be left with bad data, Sevinc said. Perhaps some of the data points from a third-party provider are missing or duplicated, or a company recently changed some software that affected how its data is tracked, or maybe some anomalies can be chalked up to simple human error.

Sevinc is aiming to combat this with his latest venture Qualytics, which is commercializing technology that automates the process of catching and separating data anomalies, so companies can address them before they affect any decisions. The tech evaluates historical data and uses rules laid out by customer companies to assess the quality of data based on eight categories: duplication, completeness, coverage, conformity, consistency, accuracy, volumetrics and timeliness. Sevinc describes it as a kind of data firewall.

"When we look at bad data, we make bad decisions," Sevinc said. "I want to make sure what the data companies are looking at, they have enough confidence in it to make decisions based on it."

Dealing with bad data is something Sevinc experienced firsthand as a co-founder of digital health startup emocha Mobile Health and of financial tech startup Facet Wealth, as well as in his previous role as managing director at the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center. For example, he said Facet Wealth routinely collected data from more than 30 different external systems and commonly faced accuracy issues, like cases of a single customer being counted multiple times. And at the Technology Innovation Center, where Sevinc would analyze electronic health records data for Johns Hopkins, he sometimes found anomalies such as a patient with an age of over 130, or a record containing recent lab results but no corresponding order for those labs.

Qualytics — a play on the combination of "quality" and "analytics" — was launched a little over a year ago, and recently raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from an array of investors including Inner Loop Capital, the LegalTech Fund, TCP Venture Capital, Saas Ventures, Gaingels, various angel investors and the Maryland Momentum Fund, which contributed $250,000 to the round. The round provided validation for Sevinc and his team of fellow veteran entrepreneurs, and was largely used toward staffing up and salarying its now 16-member team, he said.

The venture has secured a "number of early customers," Sevinc said, and is in conversations with some larger enterprises as well. Assuming the company continues to hit its revenue goals, he expects to begin considering a larger raise after the fourth quarter of this year.

Sevinc has learned a lot from growing other successful local startups, and said he is bringing along and applying plenty of "battle scars," lessons and observations to his latest venture. He shared a few of the ones that are guiding early growth efforts at Qualytics.