In a data-driven world, the way we understand, process and visualize business metrics is becoming a key skill — even for those of us who may not be data scientists. One company is launching to help make it easier for companies to quickly integrate, organize and display data from different sources.
San Francisco-based startup Coalesce announced Thursday that it raised $5.92 million in seed funding with a mission to disrupt the data transformation space. The round was led by 11.2 Capital and GreatPoint Ventures.
The company was founded by a team of data pioneers who recognized just how difficult it was to synthesize really complex use cases into a streamlined data report when there are multiple sources pulling in tons of data points, then trying to make sense of it all in layman's terms. Coalesce CEO and co-Founder Armon Petrossian witnessed this problem firsthand while working at WhereScape, where he met his company's future co-founder.
"While we were there, I was very much focused on data warehousing. They were having problems and we also encountered dozens of Fortune 50, Fortune 500, global organizations that were also having those same problems with their data. So we became focused specifically on data transformation — and for helping our customers solve that problem and recognize the kind of shortcomings and what this space has available along with patterns and issues and use cases," Petrossian told me.
Unlike other data transformation tools currently on the market, Coalesce is the first platform that is able to automate data transformations quickly, claiming it can increase developer productivity tenfold.
“The largest bottleneck in the data analytics supply chain today is transformations. As more companies move to the cloud, the weaknesses in their data transformation layer are becoming apparent,” Petrossian said in a statement.
Beyond the data analytics supply chain bottleneck, Petrossian told me that the biggest challenge companies are facing is, perhaps unsurprisingly, finding great data talent. This isn't entirely to blame on the Great Resignation — businesses are simply demanding more and more data than ever before. Coalesce's platform is easing the burden of companies having to hire large data departments by automating much of the data cleaning processes so that end users can focus on the data findings and make the tangible changes in real time.
Petrossian said the seed funding will be used to continue building out the platform, grow the customer base, increase marketing efforts and further research and development.
When asked what drew the CEO to found the company in San Francisco, he told me that proximity to top tech talent, venture funding and other data-centric partners played a big part. So did the Italian food in North Beach.
