data.world, the enterprise data catalog for the “modern” data stack, announced a $50 million Series C financing led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs).
Additional investors reportedly include Prologis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Vopak Ventures, Sandbox Insurtech Ventures, Paul Albright, Rick Braddock, Zachary Karabell, Dave Liu, and Scott Stephenson. As mentioned in an update shared with CI, the total fundraising now “stands at $132.3 million.”
data.world’s Cloud-native SaaS data catalog “combines an intuitive user experience and knowledge-graph foundation to deliver powerful data discovery, agile data governance, and actionable insights.”
The company has “a strong customer base across multiple verticals including banking, insurance, high-tech, healthcare, and the public sector. Customers include Penguin Random House UK, Prologis, Verisk Analytics, WPP, the Associated Press, and Vopak.”
One of the few Certified B corporations in the data and analytics space and home to the world’s largest collaborative open data community, data.world “is mission-driven to help organizations transform raw data into knowledge that everyone can use.”
Brett Hurt, co-founder and CEO of data.world, said:
“Leaders understand the importance of extracting key insights from their data to drive their business or organization, but they have struggled to put in place the necessary infrastructure to do so broadly across their departments and teams.”
Hurt added:
“We look forward to collaborating with our partners, including Goldman Sachs, to dramatically expand our product offerings, open new markets, and provide companies with solutions that drive data literacy, access, and usability all powered by our knowledge graph. We are quickly becoming the most deployed data tool within our customers and will continue to evolve our data catalog platform into the front office for data and analytics work. We couldn’t be prouder to add Goldman Sachs to our family of investors, and we are truly fortunate to be surrounded by so many incredibly helpful investors and advisors.”
The additional capital will “accelerate data.world’s global expansion, talent acquisition, and product innovation to meet the growing market demand for its next-generation data catalog.”
As part of the transaction, Mike Reilly, a vice president in the Growth Equity business “within Goldman Sachs, has joined the data.world Board of Directors.”
Reilly remarked:
“data.world sits at the intersection of several prevailing trends that are defining the future of data management, The company’s architecture allows for industry-leading ease and speed of integration with complex, heterogeneous data infrastructures.”
Reilly added:
“As data becomes the backbone of all businesses, data.world has created a UI purpose-built for both technical and business users ensuring that enterprises capture maximum value and adoption from their data investments. Given their positioning and product differentiation, we believe that they are best-positioned to capture extensive market share in the evolving, high-growth data catalog space.”
Jason Pressman, managing director of Shasta Ventures, said:
“data.world has one of the best founding teams I’ve ever seen, and they have executed flawlessly from the founding of the company until today. I believe that all businesses in every industry need to analyze and utilize their data strategically to develop and maintain a competitive advantage on an ongoing basis. data.world has the best platform in existence to help companies better understand and utilize their own data. Moreover, the deep commitment to a fantastic user experience democratizes data so that everyone in any organization can easily use the tools. This is the future, and the opportunity here is enormous.”
Luke Slotwinski, VP of Data & Analytics at Prologis, noted:
“Trust in data is critical to data-driven decision making and driving company performance and data.world has been an important partner in making this possible. We leverage data.world’s data and knowledge management platform to democratize data, empowering analytics self-service and data understanding throughout our business. Prologis Ventures has been a part of several funding rounds with data.world, including this one — we believe in the product, user experience, and mission.”
Chris Zock, partner, Sandbox Insurtech Ventures, stated:
“The insurance industry is fiercely competitive. The most successful insurers understand the value of integrating data into critical business processes. I believe data.world is the best solution to bring data together from the inside and outside of an organization to enable better and faster decision making. Brett and the team deliver real business outcomes to their customers by filling a universal gap in the enterprise technology stack.”
data.world will “provide more detail on the fundraising announcement and spotlight new innovations at its global spring summit on April 7 at 11:00 a.m. CST.”
The virtual event “is free to join, and data.world expects it to be the largest summit yet based on registrations.”
With the completion of this $50M growth fundraise, data.world “is hiring at an accelerated pace.”