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Metaplane raises $8.4M to increase data trust
Metaplane, a data observability startup, was officially known today as Quantifai Inc. and announced today that it had closed an $8.4 Million seed funding round led by Khosla Venture.
Kevin Hu, an MIT graduate, founded the startup in 2020. He is also the company's CEO. He was previously a HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli, and Guru Mahendran, an ex-Appcues Inc. developer. Metaplane was originally designed to be a customer success platform that analyzes data from companies to prevent churn. After completing Y Combinator's accelerator program the team realized their talents were better suited for developing data analytics tools and so the company pivoted.
Hu spoke with TechCrunch to explain that some of the customer success tools that the company had created couldn't be used because of data quality issues. Metaplane decided to use the software observability principles to improve data quality.
Metaplane uses historical metadata from its customers to train anomaly detection models that monitor the quality of its customers' data. These monitors consider seasonality, customer feedback, and trends to reduce alert fatigue. Metaplane developed a proprietary algorithm that allows the models to understand the data they are looking at and to make assumptions based on their historical knowledge.
Metaplane also examines data lineage. It traces the information from a data lake or data warehouse back to the systems that generated it, such as Slack and PagerDuty, email clients, and so forth. It can also alert stakeholders to data quality issues that may arise from these systems.
TechCrunch was told by Hu that Metaplane wanted to be the "Datadog for Data," referring to the application monitoring firm that has become an indispensable tool for DevOps teams in assessing the health of their apps as well as the infrastructure that they use.
Hu explained that data teams in high-growth companies use our platform to save time and increase trust by using data. They can understand when things are broken, what went wrong, and how to fix it before an executive contacts them about a broken dashboard.
Metaplane's data observation tools go far beyond simply alerting customers about data problems. Hu wrote a blog post about the seed funding round pointing out that data quality is a problem but that data observability can be used to solve additional problems.
Some customers now use Metaplace to analyze company spending patterns and understand the data being used within their companies. Hu stated that Metaplane is committed to catering to these users and plans to provide "first-class support to gain awareness into every piece metadata."
Metaplane is growing in popularity. Its platform is being used by over 140 companies including Appcues, Reforge Inc., and Imperfect Foods Inc. Hu stated that the company will use the cash raised today to invest in its product and add more platform integrations and discovery tools.
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