DevOps has changed the game for how developers build, deploy, update, and monitor applications across their network. Now an eponymous startup called DataOps.live – which has built a DataOps platform based on the learnings of DevOps, but aimed at the world of data science – is announcing a round of funding due to the high demand for its services.
The London startup has raised $17.5 million from new lender Notion Capital, as well as previous investors Anthos Capital and Snowflake, the data cloud computing giant.
Snowflake is truly a strategic investor here: DataOps.live is built to work specifically with data housed at Snowflake. The plan is to use some of this latest funding to continue developing improvements to that service, as well as investing in working with unstructured data and other data warehousing providers as well, said Nick Halsey, the US established COO of the startup.
“This is currently a hot market segment. We support the AI apps that everyone is trying to implement,” said Halsey. “Snowflake is the best at what it does. At the moment we only work with structured data, but we will expand to other cloud data platforms.”
At a time when funding cycles are lengthening for many startups – in part because of the current challenges of raising money at favorable valuations, and in some cases not raising any money at all – it is remarkable that DataOps is only 15 months away. live team raised their $10 million seed round.
The interest in the company and the need for more financing are partly a result of the company’s growth. DataOps.live’s revenue grew 400% in the past fiscal year. And the startup says it ran more than 1 million pipelines, orchestrated more than 10 million jobs, and ran 50 million data tests in the past year. The project exceeds all these figures this year.
The issues that DataOps.live addresses are commonplace in the world of data analytics: Working with data from multiple containers and other locations can lead to slower development times, backlogs, and versioning issues — all of which become more complicated and complex as data pipelines grow (and they all grow). The pitch DataOps.live is making is that the platform can help reduce the cost of managing and working with data by 30% by automating repetitive tasks and providing greater insight into how data moves to drive efficiency and improve security.
Co-founders Justin Mullen and Guy Adams can rightfully claim to be early movers and even pioneers in the field of DataOps. By training software developers, they built an early version of the startup platform when they worked at a professional services firm called Datalytyx to create a better structure around how they tackled these issues for their clients.
The work they did was part coding — of the platform itself — and part formalizing the methodology, inspired by the work in DevOps. They went on to create a community called TrueDataOps; they wrote a book together (with others) called DataOps For Dummies; and they founded the startup that announced funding today. (Datalyx was eventually acquired by Mphasis and closing that deal appears to coincide with the launch of DataOps.live.)
Enterprise startups continue to see a lot of business traction at a time when funding for more consumer-oriented companies is trickling a bit. Notion’s interest in the company stems in part from that, but also from the growing need for better tools for those who work with data. The DataOps Platform market is estimated to be currently worth about $3.9 billion, growing to $10.9 billion by 2028, and it’s also growing as a competitive field, with AWS, Alteryx, dbt, and many others also in the same space.
“Data is the lifeblood of business today, but managing and scaling data operations can be a daunting task. Data needs can grow faster than operations teams can handle, leading to slow or one-off development efforts,” Stephanie Opdam, a director at Notion Capital, said in a statement. “DataOps.live is at the forefront of a movement that enables companies to improve data quality, streamline many data processes simultaneously, and accelerate product development. DataOps.live has a fantastic and growing team, a great product and impressive traction. We believe it has the potential to become the next category leader.”
And given the competition in the data warehousing market, Snowflake’s interest will most likely yield a closer relationship with a player in the DataOps space that has already proven to be tightly integrated with its platform.
“DataOps.live enables organizations to build, test and deploy Snowflake products and applications in the same way as software applications. They increase development speed and accelerate adoption while preserving governance and security,” said Stefan Williams, head of business development and Snowflake Ventures, when the startup announced its seed. “By expanding our partnership with DataOps.live, we offer joint customers the ability to collaborate with confidence within their organization and beyond, and we look forward to supporting the DataOps.live team in the next phases of their growth.”
