Enterprise

Data observability platform Acceldata raises $50M

Comment

Concept illustration depicting data observability
Image Credits: Z_wei / Getty Images

Acceldata, the company behind a data observability platform used by multinational enterprises, including Oracle and Verisk, today announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.

Founded in 2018, San Jose–based Acceldata is one of a growing number of companies setting out to help organizations understand the health of their data and identify any problems with data that may be spread across multiple clouds, applications, and systems.

With prebuilt integrations for the likes of Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and more, Acceldata can be used to assess the quality of a company’s data in transit or at rest, while also giving insights into the infrastructure underpinning their data pipelines.

“To build trust in data, the flow of information from multiple sources needs to be streamlined and efficiently managed through data pipelines,” Acceldata CEO and co-founder Rohit Choudhary explained to TechCrunch. “This not only supports analytics initiatives but also maximizes business value. Moreover, data observability ensures that the data used for analytical and governance purposes is suitable and meets its intended goals.”

Acceldata in action
Acceldata in action Image Credits: Acceldata

Recession-proof?

Despite all the plummeting valuations, down-rounds and layoffs impacting the tech world, there has been a growing sense over the past year that the observability vertical could be just a little recession-proof. By way of example, the likes of Observe, Monte Carlo, Cribl, Manta, and Coralogix all raised substantial amounts of funding last year, while in the five short weeks of 2023 so far we’ve already seen two fledgling observability startups in the form of Metaplane and Chaos Genius announce $8.4 million and $3.3 million seed funding rounds, respectively.

It’s worth noting that not all “observability” companies are created equally, with some focusing exclusively on more traditional application observability to help engineers collect metrics of their software performance, while others do address data observability but with a focus on one or two specific layers, such as “quality” or “infrastructure.” Acceldata says it differentiates through covering a full gamut of layers across data infrastructure, quality, pipelines, and users. This, it says, supports more use cases, including “spend intelligence,” which allows its customers to manage and predict their data processing costs, as well as giving them insights on data reliability — so-called bad data can cost companies a lot of money in computing costs.

Prior to now, Acceldata had raised around $46 million, and with another $50 million in the bank, Choudhary said the fresh cash injection will help the company spread the good word about why data observability should be top-of-agenda for data-driven companies.

“Because the data industry is very broad, there is continuing confusion around terms like data observability, creating a need for education around its ‘what and why,’ and the benefit to enterprises,” Choudhary said. “With this funding, Acceldata will also further awareness for the industry through thought leadership, market education, as well as expanding and innovating products and services to better serve evolving customer needs.”

Choudhary added that it plans to bolster its existing headcount by 100 through 2023, taking its total number of employees to around 270 — further evidence, perhaps, that data-focused software companies are well-positioned to weather the current economic headwinds.

“Even in the current economic environment, investment in data continues to grow and our platform addresses the ongoing challenges experienced by data practitioners,” Choudhary noted.

Acceldata’s Seres C round of funding was led by March Capital, with participation from Insight Partners, Industry Ventures and Sanabil Investments.

More TechCrunch

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads. Designed as an independent appeals board that hears cases and then makes precedent-setting content…

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

The company says it’s refocusing and prioritizing fewer initiatives that will have the biggest impact on customers and add value to the business.

SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

The U.K.’s self-proclaimed “world-leading” regulations for self-driving cars are now official, after the Automated Vehicles (AV) Act received royal assent — the final rubber stamp any legislation must go through…

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

SoLo Funds CEO Travis Holoway: “Regulators seem driven by press releases when they should be motivated by true consumer protection and empowering equitable solutions.”

Fintech lender SoLo Funds is being sued again by the government over its lending practices

Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient and —…

Rollup wants to be the hardware engineer’s workhorse

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is not just about groundbreaking innovations, insightful panels, and visionary speakers — it’s also about listening to YOU, the audience, and what you feel is top of…

Disrupt Audience Choice vote closes Friday

Google says the new SDK would help Google expand on its core mission of connecting the right audience to the right content at the right time.

Google is launching a new Android feature to drive users back into their installed apps

Jolla has taken the official wraps off the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant in the making. The reborn startup is building a privacy-focused AI device — aka…

Jolla debuts privacy-focused AI hardware

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday. The voice, called Sky, is…

OpenAI to remove ChatGPT’s Scarlett Johansson-like voice

The ChatGPT mobile app’s net revenue first jumped 22% on the day of the GPT-4o launch and continued to grow in the following days.

ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch

Dating app maker Bumble has acquired Geneva, an online platform built around forming real-world groups and clubs. The company said that the deal is designed to help it expand its…

Bumble buys community building app Geneva to expand further into friendships

CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion. 

CyberArk snaps up Venafi for $1.54B to ramp up in machine-to-machine security

Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have an almost unfair advantage…

OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close of $10M fund

A Singapore High Court has effectively approved Pine Labs’ request to shift its operations to India.

Pine Labs gets Singapore court approval to shift base to India

The AI Safety Institute, a U.K. body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, has said it will open a second location in San Francisco. 

UK opens office in San Francisco to tackle AI risk

Companies are always looking for an edge, and searching for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do that is by running an internal hackathon around a…

Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Featured Article

I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Women in tech still face a shocking level of mistreatment at work. Melinda French Gates is one of the few working to change that.

1 day ago
I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s  broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of…

Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022

Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many…

Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine