A D.C. startup has spent the last three years dedicated to automating the flow of data. But now, it's focusing on the flow of dollars — $32 million, to be exact, in its second fundraising round so far this year, this time from some powerhouse investors from both coasts.
Prefect Technologies Inc., a data engineering company with District headquarters and a San Francisco office, said it's raised its Series B financing from lead investor Tiger Global Management LLC of New York, with first-time participation by high-profile early stage investor Bessemer Venture Partners of San Francisco. Existing investor Positive Sum also participated.
The new capital will let Prefect hire up, grow its commercial business and further develop its platform, which helps automate and schedule data pipelines and workflows for customers, but without seeing or revealing their proprietary code. Prefect taps into an open-source software system, developed by scores of data engineers and scientists, to help customers build and improve their workflow management processes, while also offering an established software platform that lets customers stream, organize, manage and track their data and overall web infrastructure. The goal, it said: to help double their productivity.
That client roster, spanning a range of industries, includes Capital One Financial Corp., Washington Nationals, Progressive Corp., Apple Inc., Cisco and FabFitFun, an L.A.-based gift and subscription service. The company lists Mike McCarty, director of software engineering, as one of its advisory board members. That board, now topping 30 people, also includes former DocuSign CEO Keith Krach and PayPal Chief Data Engineer Sid Anand.
Now with 23 employees, Prefect is working to triple that number, adding another 50 people to its staff, according to founder and CEO Jeremiah Lowin. It’s hiring across its engineering, marketing, product and sales teams, with about a dozen open positions listed on its site, though many of them remote positions.
And that growing headcount mirrors its increasing revenue, with an annual run rate in the seven figures and customers joining “at an exponential rate,” Lowin told us, declining to share specifics. Sales for its Prefect Cloud offering have also been growing 130% each quarter since it went live in February 2020, and the company’s broader community of users is growing by nearly 1,000 people each month, Lowin said.
The latest investment follows an $11.5 million Series A round that Prefect announced in February of this year. That raise was led by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, another Prefect adviser, and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management and partner of Positive Sum. That young venture capital firm has indirect ties to another local company through Managing Director Sam Cates, who previously invested in Derwood manufacturing marketplace Xometry Inc. before its recent initial public offering announcement.
A total 26 investors had participated in that round, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in December. Those names included Nat Friedman, CEO of San Francisco’s GitHub; Sam Teller, partner at Chicago’s Valor Equity Partners; Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Google subsidiary Kaggle; Daniel Gross, founder of San Francisco-based Pioneer; and Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer of Atreides Management LP.
Before that, the company reported raising $2.5 million in a debt offering with 16 investors in 2019, per an SEC filing. Those rounds, among others, bring the company’s total raised to date to $46.7 million.
While Prefect's leaders have acknowledged the challenge in working with open-source products, Prefect recently scored a win with a partnership with Microsoft Corp. that stretches its reach to a larger customer base. That work includes Microsoft for Startups, a program that supports select startups — now, with access to Prefect’s platform.
Lowin, an adviser to multiple companies including Spotify and FabFitFun, founded Prefect in 2018. He previously built machine learning software business Lowin Data Co. and oversaw risk management for multiple investment firms, including New York’s King Street Capital Management. He has a bachelor’s in economics and master’s in statistics from Harvard University.
Prefect joins a growing list of companies that have raised large hauls of late, most recently including D.C. polling and data firm Morning Consult with $60 million, Arlington auto refinancing startup MotoRefi with $45 million; Silver Spring personal finance startup Truebill also with $45 million; D.C. cannabis company Holistic Industries with $55 million; Rockville health-tech company DrFirst with $50 million; FiscalNote with another $40 million, Gaithersburg superbug hunter Adaptive Phage with $40.75 million and a flurry of others.
