The startup life seems to be moving at a particularly accelerated speed for one of the Cincinnati’s newest entrepreneurs — within the span of mere weeks, Somesh Saxena has exited his gig at GE Aviation to launch Pantomath, a new data startup, while landing millions in funding to help get the concept off the ground.
Momentum continues to build quickly. The company’s quick rise is a tribute to its team’s expertise as well as momentum generated by the city’s largest startup exit last year.
Saxena, a University of Cincinnati graduate, said he had seen firsthand how data issues plague numerous large enterprises during his career. Pathomath is building a cloud-based platform to essentially fix those broken data pipelines.
Saxena left his job at GE Aviation, where he managed the company’s enterprise data program, in February, and weeks later secured $4 million in seed funding, led by Bowery Capital and Epic Ventures, two big-name firms based in New York and Salt Lake City, respectively. Other angel investors also participated.
Saxena said the fast start is a credit to the problem Pantomath is working to solve. He also said his brother, Vndly co-founder Shashank Saxena, served as a source of inspiration and crucial connection — Bowery and Epic are both former Vndly investors.
Vndly, a provider of workforce and vendor management technology, recently celebrated the region’s largest startup exit to date with its sale to Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) for $510 million.
Shashank Saxena is leading Pantomath’s board as chairman and adviser.
“What he's achieved, it's been phenomenal,” Somesh Saxena said. “Seeing that firsthand, and with his guidance, his support and mentoring, I felt it was the right time to switch gears and take that plunge.”
Pantomath, at length, brings automation to data operations teams with a cloud-based data observability and traceability platform. When data pipelines fail, which Somesh Saxena said happens often, people supporting those pipelines are working in silos. That troubleshooting requires a lot of back and forth. “It’s like a wild goose chase,” he said.
Pantomath would allow companies to instantly detect those operational challenges through automated real-time alerts; troubleshoot them with a single-view into the pipeline across several data verticals to identify the root-cause; and resolve the issue with the click of a button.
Saxena said the goal is to improve data uptime and availability, increase productivity with fewer operations “fire drills” and offer cost-savings to customers.
“Data availability (is) extremely important for organizations,” he said. “Our team wants to demystify complex data ecosystems and make data operations simpler.”
Mike Brown, founder and general partner at Bowery Capital, told me his firm finalized its investment in Pantomath in late February — the same month Saxena left GE Aviation — when the company was only an idea.
While a lot of startups market themselves as experts in areas like data lineage, Pathomath is building across the entire data platform, which is unique. “That need hadn’t been met yet, and that's exciting to us,” Brown said. As a founder, he said Saxena has "tremendous command of the space."
“When you look at the product, it's different than most existing vendors. When you think of the data lineage problem, when a data pipeline fails, Pantomath can say exactly what happened, here’s all the stuff impacted and how to fix it,” he said. “If you narrow in specifically on what he's trying to do, there's only one or two companies in the category, and they're all early in their journey. Pound-for-pound, when stacked up against the other players in the market, we feel he’ll be able to achieve success.”
Brown said Bowery is also banking on the flywheel effect that will likely follow Vndly’s exit. Some people from within the company will inevitably leave after finishing their earnout to launch new startups. Brown said Vndly has been able to hire great engineering and sales talent locally, which also gives Cincinnati a competitive advantage.
While Pantomath is only Bowery’s second area investment, Brown is bullish on the ecosystem.
“We’re banking on the fact that there’s probably going to be this huge tailwind,” he said. “There hasn't been a lot of data startups in Cincy, and there’s not much of a headwind — if you're going to go New York or the Bay Area, where there's massive headwind, you're going to compete with all these other startups for the same talent.”
Saxena said the funding will be largely dedicated to hiring high-caliber talent. Its six-member team, which is currently headquartered at Orca Coworking in Mason, is anchored by Jeremy Gaerke, Pantomath’s director of software engineering, and former chief architect at Paycor. Gaerke also logged stints at Axcess Financial (now CNG Holdings), a firm that provided support to Check n Go; IT group Pinnacle Solutions and market research firm Ipsos.
Saxena said it’s too early to estimate how many Pantomath will hire over the next year leading into its next fundraise. But the seed money gives the company time to build.
The startup has already secured its first customers, and the plan is to deliver to them by the end of the year, Saxena said.
“I think we’ve hit a good balance,” he said. “We have people who are excited about the solution, and the problem resonates with them. The problem is challenging enough it will be fun to build. But at the same time, it’s very feasible. And the funding helps. This isn’t a problem you can solve with a two-person team in a garage. We’re looking to move at a rapid pace, but having time on our hands is helpful for something of this scale and magnitude.”
