Piet Jan de Bruin, former CEO of Tuft and Needle, is working on a new venture called Iomete, and the startup has gained early traction, including admission in the latest class at Y-Combinator, one of the most well-known startup accelerators in the world.
Iomete is an all-encompassing data infrastructure platform designed to replace a handful of other technology offerings for companies using big datasets. The Iomete platform is an all-in-one solution that includes everything from data ingestion and warehousing, to dashboard outputs and data cataloging.
In general, data infrastructure is complex and a single company might rely on a slew of outside vendors to cobble together a single system. The idea at Iomete is to streamline all these processes into a single offering, reducing time and energy spent on integration, while providing ongoing maintenance as well.
Right now Iomete is specifically targeting other startups and high-growth scaleups as its customers, as these smaller teams generally do not have the resources (or interest) to manage the most complex data infrastructures. But the platform can scale up and adapt to more advanced needs, meaning it works for larger customers too.
“For me, it was kind of a logical step, to try to do something for myself,'' de Bruin told AZ Inno. “At Tuft and Needle, I really fell in love with startups. So I had this ambition, this longing to build something for myself.”
Coming together
de Bruin left Tuft and Needle in 2020 after about two years in the top job. He had met Vusal Dadalov, Iomete’s CEO, at this point and invested pre-seed money in the company, but he was working on a direct-to-consumer air conditioning startup in Arizona, which ultimately failed.
“Two months after we started, Covid hit,” de Bruin said of the air conditioning startup. “We had developed a product, we had bootstrapped it, so put our own money in it, and then the whole supply chain came to a halt.”
As that effort dissolved, in mid-2020, Dadalov asked de Bruin to help him find a co-founder for Iomete. Dadalov has technical experience, previously working as a software engineer at Uber, but he wanted someone with expertise on the business side. Instead of recommending someone, de Bruin said he’d be eager to take on that role himself.
So far, Iomete has raised $800,000 from investors, including some from Y Combinator. Iomete is one of 400 companies in the winter cohort this year and de Bruin said they have learned a lot from the YC partners, specifically about the big mistakes to avoid.
Iomete and the rest of the cohort will pitch their ventures at a demo day at the end of the month, where hundreds of investors will gather to watch.
The vision is for Iomete to have a distributed workforce, with pockets of specializations clustered together. de Bruin lives in the Valley and he plans to build the company’s sales and marketing team here. Dadalov lives in Amsterdam, but came from Azerbaijan, where Iomete plans to locate its engineering team in Baku, the nation's capital.
