A Cincinnati startup has raised its second pool of venture funding since launching last year, and the round stands as one of the largest in the region in 2023.
Mason-based Pantomath, a data startup launched by ex-GE Aerospace employee Somesh Saxena, completed a $14 million Series A in September, led by Silicon Valley’s Sierra Ventures. The company’s seed-stage investors, New York’s Bowery Capital and Salt Lake City-based Epic Ventures, also participated.
The round brings Pantomath’s total funding to $18 million – all raised in a 16-month span. The company said the new capital will be used to innovate through AI and expand to new territories.
“Pantomath solves a very critical problem for companies, which is why we’ve seen significant traction since we started,” Saxena told me. “We are fortunate to be working with some really strong local talent that has enabled us to create an innovative and first-of-its-kind product. The additional funding is going to help us take the product to new heights and add even more value to our customers.”
Saxena – whose brother Shashank Saxena led Vndly to a $510 million exit to Workday last year – left his job at GE Aerospace, where his organization supported 18,000 data consumers, to launch Pantomath in February 2022.
At GE, he served as a data and analytics leader, leading multiple programs at the company, including enterprise data and analytics, self-service data, big data and robotic process automation.
The roles, he said, afforded him unique insights into the problems and challenges encountered by data teams. Most organizations struggle with bad data, making poor business decisions that can directly impact their bottom line.
Pantomath’s AI-driven data pipeline observability and traceability platform allows customers to:
- Detect data reliability issues through real-time alerts
- Troubleshoot them with end-to-end cross-platform technical lineage and aggregated logs
- Identify root-cause instantly
- Resolve issues quickly with automated impact analysis.
Offering observability across an entire data stack significantly reduce data downtime and increases trust in the information, Pantomath said.
The startup, a Cincy Inno Startup to Watch in 2023, last year secured $4 million in seed funding just weeks after its inception. It has continued to experience rapid growth.
Its headcount has more than tripled since the Series A to more than 30 – or more than 40 if including contractors. With the exception of one remote hire, every full-time equivalent is local to Cincinnati, Saxena told me.
The team is preparing to move into a new, larger 10,000-square-foot space in Mason. The lease is currently being finalized.
Its customers include Paycor, Coterie Insurance, CNG Holdings, Lendly and G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, among others.
“We selected Pantomath due to its one-of-its-kind platform that auto-discovers our data assets, visualizing these relationships in real-time across our ecosystem,” Rick Huff, chief information officer at Paycor, said in the release.
“Pantomath provides end-to-end traceability, which enables our teams to focus on building new solutions instead of getting mired down in operational tasks. We believe Pantomath will enable significant productivity savings while ensuring our data is reliable and trustworthy.”
Pantomath’s raise is the third largest from a Cincinnati-area startup this year. HerMD, a health care startup focused on women’s sexual health and menopause, closed an oversubscribed $18 million Series A-1 round this summer. And Electrada, a developer, owner and operator of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, received $22 million in additional funds from famed investment group BlackRock in mid-May.
For Sierra Ventures, its the firm's second investment locally. It also counts Over-the-Rhine's Astronomer, a data orchestration startup, and one of the region's rare unicorns, as one of its portfolio companies.
“We believe Somesh's experience leading data and analytics at a large enterprise has given him unique insights into the data operations challenges facing most companies today,” Mark Fernandes, managing partner at Sierra Ventures, said in a release. “We have been impressed with Pantomath's ability to meet the needs of some of the most demanding F500 customers in a very short period of time.”
